Addon to Support User Created Forums

[zethon]

Putting aside the technical issues, is there any TOS violation for releasing or developing an AddOn that allows users to create their own forums, similar to how Reddit works. This AddOn would also allow those users to be moderators of the forums they created. Is there any TOS violation with this?

 

[Paul B]

As long as there is only a single installation and database then there would be no issue as far as licensing is concerned.

I will add that it has been tried, coupled with crypto, but was not successful for various reasons.
A shame because it was a great concept with some innovative ideas.

 

[zethon]

As long as there is only a single installation and database then there would be no issue as far as licensing is concerned.

I will add that it has been tried, coupled with crypto, but was not successful for various reasons.
A shame because it was a great concept with some innovative ideas.

Any links to the unsuccessful project(s)? I'd be curious to see.

 

[Paul B]

The project is dead and they never publicly announced it.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Given xenForo flexible permission system, is it even necessary to create an addon for this?

 

[Paul B]

While it is possible to give moderator permissions on a per user/forum basis, the forums and permissions would have to be created by an administrator.

The project I referred to allowed anyone to set up a "forum" from the front end and allow members to view/not view/subscribe, etc.

The overhead of rebuilding permissions rapidly increases though as this particular use case has not been designed in.

 

[zethon]

While it is possible to give moderator permissions on a per user/forum basis, the forums and permissions would have to be created by an administrator.

The project I referred to allowed anyone to set up a "forum" from the front end and allow members to view/not view/subscribe, etc.

The overhead of rebuilding permissions rapidly increases though as this particular use case has not been designed in.

I've started working on an AddOn to do this. My original thought is that Admins would be able to specify a Forum under which all user-created forums would go, and all user-created forums would inherit permissions from that parent forum. Eventually I want the AddOn to allow users to make their forums private (only people they explicitly allow can see) and restricted (everyone can see but only those explicitly allowed can post), but for a 1.0 version all user-created forums will have the same permissions as that parent.

I am curious if you have any thoughts on how this could scale? I thought a good Admin Setting would be "Max # of User Created Forums" but then I wonder what a reasonable default is? 100? 1000? I'm very curious about where XF struggles to scale.

 

[zethon]

I am curious if you have any thoughts on how this could scale? I thought a good Admin Setting would be "Max # of User Created Forums" but then I wonder what a reasonable default is? 100? 1000? I'm very curious about where XF struggles to scale.

To expand on the last part a little bit, I think it would be wise for anyone using my AddOn to follow Reddit's model on this -- and that's to not have a parent node that lists all the children. Instead the user-created forums would be found organically through searches, users posting links, a "random forum" option, etc. This would save XF from having to list hundreds, or potentially thousands, of forums on a single page.