Loomio group forums added

One long requested feature during the transition away from the old Freegamedev.net forums, was some way for hosted groups to better organize their own sub-forums. This was possible to some extend on the old phpBB boards, but on the new Flarum based forum no such function exists. After multiple trials of different forum software, we believe that we finally found a suitable alternative: Loomio groups on F-hub.org.

What is Loomio?

Please have a look at the official Loomio website for a full overview. But the tl;dr version is that Loomio allows fully self-managed group forums (public and private), with sub-groups and full membership control. It is a tool originally developed for internal coordination of cooperatives and includes a lot of useful decision making features. We hope that these tools will also come in handy for software projects once they outgrow the BDFL phase and more contributors are actively involved in shaping the future of the project.

Another useful feature is the integration with various chat systems, most noteably Matrix and Discord. Sadly IRC or XMPP is not supported at the moment, but we are working on adding this option for our internal chat network by emulating Slack webhooks.

How to request the creation of a group?

While primarily intended for organisations hosted on F-hub.org, we are open to adding groups for any interested FOSS project or interest group. Just get in contact with us and we can create the initial group. Once that is done, a group admin has full control over it and can add sub-groups and members as needed. People that already have an Forgejo account on F-hub.org can use that to easily sign-up via the OAUTH button on the login page. But others can also be easily invited via email.

Inviting external users

We made the decision to not allow public registration on our Loomio group service. This is to prevent spam and keep the groups managable with a dedicated group of actively involved people only. However inviting external users is very easy for group admins. Invitation emails can be send from the members page and there is also the option to create a reusable invitation link, that can be shared on a project internal chat for example.