📖 Introduction
Welcome to our newest community update. As some time has passed since the last community update we want to give you an update on different things that happened or are happening in the future. In Edition 5 of our community updates 2022 we featured a overview about how to enable multi language support for Flarum communities. Feel free to skip back to this post in case you are interested. But now lets move on to our newest update.
🗣️ 20i FOSS Award
Like in previous years there is a FOSS award taking place also voting fot he best Community & Social platform. We would appreciate your support over at 20i (https://www.20i.com/foss-awards/category/community-and-social). Last year we had the honour of being the winner in this category - you can read more about that here: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/30334-20i-foss-awards-winner.
Besides this I also want to leave a link to slant for a more general rating and overview of Flarum with you: https://www.slant.co/topics/898/viewpoints/7/~best-web-forum-software-packages~flarum. Making more people aware of the capabilities of Flarum is one key element of keeping Open Source projects active and alive.
↗️ What's happening next?
We recently announced some big changes coming to secure the longevity and activity of the Flarum project. This both includes a merging of the FOSS software, plugin marketplace (Extiverse) and managed hosting (Blomstra) into one central platform. You can read all in detail here: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2023-balancing-open-source-and-success
▶️ Flarum 1.8
The next version - and last of the 1.X series of Flarum will be Version 1.8. It will include a number of bugfixes, improvements and also features - some of which derived from proposals (both as bounties and highest voted). You can see the upcoming changes in GitHub: https://github.com/flarum/framework/milestone/35.
⏩️ Version 2.0
After releasing 1.8 the active development of features for the 1.X release series will stop. You can read in the announcement also about the focus areas for the 2.0 release. This is backed by a generous grant that will ensure that there is high and active progress in the development. You can expect breaking changes in the 2.0 release - meaning that many extensions will need some form of refactoring before they work with the new release. Hence the major version bump.
🤦♂️ Spam is such a big issue?
We have seen many of you having issues with spam being forced upon your Flarum communities. Since our last update on the issue (https://discuss.flarum.org/d/29126-community-updates-092021) there has been even further development with extensions like Turnstile or Spam prevention to help community owners battle the problem. There is also an active bounty - that is still seeking money to be implemented - trying to improve the tools available once preventative measures have failed: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/31888-fixing-up-fof-spamblock/
🏴☠️ Active Bounties:
📰 Flarum.org Update
We have recently introduced Turnstile in order to help us fighting malicious accounts from being created. Also due to the upcoming changes to the Twitter API we are actively considering removing Twitter as a possible OAuth provider. You should therefor change over either to GitHub OAuth - or just use your mail and password to access flarum.org
🏁 Final words
We hope you have liked this edition of “Community Updates”. Looking forward to your comments and ideas for future updates. We are going to pickup speed again and hope to see you soon on the next edition of Community Updates.
