DigitalWonderlab.CommunityForum 1.4.2

Community Forum for Umbraco

A discussion forum that runs inside your Umbraco 17 site. Members start threads and reply on your website, and moderators work either on the website itself or in the backoffice. There is no separate application to host.

Free to use. See Licence.

Threads and replies	Polls

Q&A boards	Backoffice moderation queue

Why we built it

We needed a forum for Umbraco 17 that was rendered on the server, had moderation built in, and kept members' posts out of the content tree. So we wrote one.

How it works

Boards are Umbraco content. Conversations are not.

The installer creates four document types: Forum, Forum Category, Forum Board and Forum Settings. You add and arrange boards in the content tree like any other page, so they get real URLs, SEO fields, publishing and permissions, and they move between environments with Umbraco Deploy or uSync.

Threads, posts, profiles, reactions, polls, messages and so on are stored in the package's own database tables (all prefixed fm), which are created when the site starts. This stops a busy forum filling your content tree with thousands of nodes, keeps members' posts out of your content deployments, and lets the forum fetch what it needs with ordinary indexed queries.

Forum users are standard Umbraco Members, so there is no second login to manage.

Moderators don't need backoffice accounts

The people best placed to moderate a community are often volunteers, subject experts or support staff, and you may not want to give them access to the backoffice.

Add a member to the Moderators member group and they get a moderation queue on the website, at {forum}/moderation, where they can approve, remove and dismiss posts. Administrators also have a queue in the backoffice, which shows forum posts and page comments together. Both work on the same data.

Every post is checked by a rules engine that scores it for spam, profanity, links, contact details and disguised words. You can add your own blocked words, spam phrases and promotional phrases, and set how strict it is. Posts that score too high are held for review or rejected. Members can report posts, and enough reports hide a post until a moderator has looked at it.

If you want an AI model to review posts as well, add the optional DigitalWonderlab.CommunityAi package. The rules engine works without it.

Features

Threads and boards

• Latest, Newest, Unanswered and Top tabs, with pagination on board lists and long threads
• Tags, with a page for each tag
• Polls, with one vote per member and results shown as percentages
• Accepted answers on Q&A boards, with solved threads labelled in listings
• Pinned and locked threads
• Members-only boards, which are left out of search, RSS, the sitemap and all public listings
• Collapsible categories on the forum home page

Posting

• An editor with bold, italic, quotes, lists, links, images by URL and emoji
• YouTube and Vimeo embeds
• Reactions, quoting, and editing or deleting your own posts
• Post content is cleaned down to a safe list of HTML tags before it is saved

Members

• Register, sign in, reset a password and manage your account
• Members must verify their email address before they can post
• Profiles with display name, signature, post count, avatar and recent threads
• @mentions, direct messages and an in-app notification list
• Optional reply notification emails, sent through your Umbraco SMTP settings
• Unread markers for each member, with "mark all as read"
• Members can delete their own account. Their posts stay, shown as "[deleted user]", and their personal data is removed. If Community Comments is installed, their comments are treated the same way.

Moderation

• A queue on the website for the Moderators group, and one in the backoffice for administrators
• Lock, pin and delete threads, edit or remove posts, and mute or ban members
• First posts from new members can be held until they have a short track record
• Authors can see their own held posts, marked "Pending review". Nobody else can.
• Honeypot fields and rate limiting on every form

Search and SEO

• Full-text search using its own Examine index
• Clean URLs, canonical tags, Open Graph and Twitter cards, and rel=prev/next on paged lists
• DiscussionForumPosting and QAPage structured data
• RSS feeds and an XML sitemap
• Pages are rendered on the server and work without JavaScript

Setup and appearance

• A Community section in the backoffice with an overview, the moderation queue, settings and a setup wizard
• The installer creates the document types, templates, member type and a starter board, and is safe to run again
• Set two brand colours to match your site. Dark mode is included.

Requirements

• Umbraco CMS 17 (17.6.2 or later) on .NET 10
• Umbraco Members
• SMTP, if you want notification emails

Install

dotnet add package DigitalWonderlab.CommunityForum

Open the Community section in the backoffice and run Setup, then add your boards under Content.

Configuration

Most settings are in the backoffice under Community > Settings: brand colours, notification emails, how strict moderation is, word lists, and the AI switch. The Forum Settings node holds the logo and whether the forum uses your site's own master template.

A few settings go in appsettings.json:

{
  "Community": {
    "Auth": {
      "BaseUrl": "https://example.com",
      "ResetPageUrl": "/community"
    }
  }
}

• BaseUrl is your site's public address. Set it in production, unless ASP.NET Core AllowedHosts already lists your real host names. Password reset and verification emails contain a security token, so they are not sent unless the link can be built from a trusted address, and the reason is written to the log.
• ResetPageUrl is where the password reset link takes the member. It defaults to /community/sign-in.

Reserved addresses

The forum uses /community/sign-in, /community/auth/*, /community/feed/* and /community/sitemap.xml, and these paths under the forum: account, search, member, messages, notifications, tag and moderation. Don't create content pages at those addresses.

Umbraco Cloud

The package copies its views and backoffice files into your site when it builds. Umbraco Cloud sees those files as changes and tries to commit them, which can block deployments. Before your first Cloud deployment with the package, add these lines to your site's cloud.gitignore (not .gitignore):

# Community Core (installed with the forum)
**/App_Plugins/CommunityCore/
**/Views/CommunityAuth/

# Community Forum
**/App_Plugins/Community/
**/Views/forum.cshtml
**/Views/forumBoard.cshtml
**/Views/forumCategory.cshtml
**/Views/_CommunityLayout.cshtml
**/Views/Partials/Community/

If Cloud has already committed any of these views (you will see an NETSDK1152 error when publishing), remove them from your repository with git rm.

Limitations in this version

• The Forum node must sit at the root of the content tree, and one forum per site is supported.
• Direct messages are not moderated, and members can't yet block or report a sender. Banned and muted members can't send messages.
• Settings are cached on each server, so on a load-balanced site the other servers pick up a change when they restart.

Related packages

• Community Comments: comments for any page, moderated from the same queue.
• Community AI Moderation: optional AI review of forum posts and comments.

Problems and ideas

Report bugs or suggest features at github.com/dwlgit/community-suite/issues.

Licence

Free to use on any number of sites, including sites you build for clients. You can keep the package's files in your site's source control and hosting, and change the views and styles it adds. Reselling or redistributing the package itself is not allowed. The full licence is in the LICENSE file in the package.

Built by Digital Wonderlab.