Community & forum

What it is

Every Nodum deployment carries its own forum at /forum — the same idea as Obsidian's forum, native to the platform — and a community hub at /community that maps the forum, the ways to contribute, and the ways to extend Nodum today (the API, MCP, the Web Clipper), with community plugins on the roadmap. The forum has five fixed rooms: Announcements (staff post, everyone reads), Help, Bug Reports, Feature Requests (like the opening post to vote), and Showcase.

Reading needs no account: topics, threads, profiles and search are public pages a search engine can index. Writing uses the account you already have — there is nothing extra to join.

Reading

Latest is the front page; Top ranks by replies over a week, month or all time. Category pages float pinned topics first. Threads number every post (#12) so links land mid-conversation, and a removed post leaves a numbered placeholder — the thread's shape never shifts under you.

Signed in, topic lists show a dot on anything with posts you have not read yet — it clears the moment you open the thread, and only ever moves forward.

Writing

New topic asks for a category, a title and markdown. The preview tab shows exactly what readers will get, because it runs the same renderer. A deliberately careful renderer, since strangers read each other here:

• Markdown with GFM (tables, task lists, fenced code) — but raw HTML stays the literal text you typed, never markup.
• Images become links. A stranger's post cannot make your browser fetch anything.

Reply at the bottom of any unlocked thread. You can edit your own posts (readers see an edited marker) and delete your own replies. A topic of yours deletes only while nobody has replied — after that the conversation belongs to everyone in it, and staff take over.

Like posts with the ♥. On Feature Requests, liking the opening post is the vote.

Search

/forum/search looks through every title and post, ranks by relevance and highlights the matches; body hits deep-link straight to the post.

Keeping it healthy

Report on any post sends it to the staff queue with your reason — once per post per person. Staff can pin, lock, retitle, recategorize and remove content anywhere, and work the queue at /forum/mod.

Staff is a flag operators grant: set COMMUNITY_BOOTSTRAP_STAFF_EMAIL in the deployment's environment before first start (that account becomes staff automatically), or later run uv run python scripts/make_staff.py person@example.com from back/.

Posting has gentle speed limits — five topics and thirty replies an hour, with a short gap between messages — enough for any human, boring for a bot.