New forums, creating and running your own part of LFGSS

Microcosm includes a feature which allows people to create their own forums. I want to turn this on, but before I open it to everyone I want to open it to a few people.

Note: This applies to creating forums within LFGSS, if you want to create your own site like LFGSS then you can do that right now, without help from me, at Microcosm

The gist is that you can create and run a forum on LFGSS, and it would appear in the list of forums along with everyone else's.

The forums are ordered by:

1. Is it pinned? Pinned forums go first in the list.
   
2. How many comments does it have in it? Higher number of comments, mean higher in the list.
   
   

When you create your forum, it will start on the last page of the list of forums on the homepage https://www.lfgss.com/ and the last page is currently Page 2 https://www.lfgss.com/microcosms/?offset=25 . If you're able to make your forum a success, and if it is of broad appeal and on-topic, then I may eventually be convinced to pin it to the front page. Presently everything above Misc & Meaningless and Classifieds are pinned.

With your own forum you can basically create little specialised areas within LFGSS. Examples of things that might prove good for their own forums:

• Tuesday Night Ride Club
  
• Mountain biking, cyclocross and off-roading
  
• Audax
  
• Time trials
  
• Other regions, i.e. "Bath"
  
  

And you could even create hyper-specific group for very small audiences, some examples I could think of might be when the forum has done things in the past to surprise people, i.e. a members only forum where a given member cannot see the forum.

As a forum owner you become liable for the content in it, and you get moderation controls for the forum. You can delete content, edit content, pin content, etc within your forum. But if you fail to act, then either hippy or myself will be able to additionally moderate anything in your forum, but mostly we'll try and stay out of your way as it's your space and we want you to set the tone of your space so long as it mostly fits the tone of the site (i.e. if you think you're going to be a little dictator of your area when the rest of the site is tolerant, this is probably not going to work and hippy or myself will intervene, but if you think anything is allowed and porn is suddenly fine, that also isn't going to work).

As a forum owner you also get to set permissions for the forum.

Via "Membership Groups", such as the one for this Announcements forum: https://www.lfgss.com/microcosms/515/memberships/ , you can grant and deny access to people.

Membership Groups work on the basis that:

• There are default groups that all new forums get
  
• The defaults can be overridden by your defining your own groups (adding a new group would remove all other user groups, thus denying them access)
  
• You cannot override the site moderators (adding a moderation group overrides nothing, it just extends moderator powers to new people)
  
• You cannot override people banned from the site (adding a banned group overrides nothing, it just bans people from your specific forum, though NB: you cannot ban the admin - me)
  
  

Permissions are granted not denied, so if someone isn't granted permission then they have none. What this means is that if you create a new membership group that isn't a moderator or banned role, then you wipe out all of the default groups and start with a blank slate of "No-one can access this except the moderators". Then you can start adding people and their permissions.

Basically... you can create private forums within the main forum... this is fine by me.

If anyone wants to have a forum, then initially I'm going to create it for them and then change the ownership to them.

So you'll need to tell me:

1. The title of the forum (a few key words to describe it)
   
2. The description for the forum (one sentence outlining what will be in the forum, what is on-topic for the forum)
   
   

I'll start this way, without making the button available to all, as I want to see how it's used, and that it makes sense for the site, before throwing the doors open to everyone.

Anyone that wants a forum therefore needs to PM me with a request.

Once you have a forum, it's up to you to do the work to tell people about it (without spamming the rest of the site), and create an engaging area of the site for your audience. That means you need to create content, keep topics active, etc.

I may be open to moving some on-topic conversations from elsewhere into your new forum if it makes sense to kick start it that way, but don't bet heavily on it - I'll only do so if I'm convinced the new forum should own that content.

Anyway, anyone who wants a forum... you need to PM me.