Hey 👋

Welcome to your new community! I'd like to share a couple of words with you before you jump into all the exciting stuff that Flarum offers.

👀 Before you start...

FreeFlarum is a community provided service and is not affiliated with Flarum, its project or the Flarum Foundation.
FreeFlarum is as a community provided service. Since it started, a lot had changed, but the core principle and purpose of FreeFlarum remains the same - to help people get their forums up and running with no hassle.
This means that FreeFlarum can't help you solve issues related to extensions or Flarum core, the same way as Flarum can't help you with FreeFlarum inquiries. These are two distinguishable projects that are independent of each other.

FreeFlarum is a free service sustained by donations
This means that it isn't recommended for big forums. FreeFlarum's main goal is to help you start from zero. Specifically, this means that FreeFlarum does not currently support more than 50 active visitors at the same time. This limit is not enforced, however you will be noticed via E-mail if your forum reaches more than 1 000 (offline) users, 5 000 discussions or 10 000 posts. FreeFlarum does not support importing your existing forum either.
It also means that it is not ideal for serious organizations and businesses - I recommend you to consider Blomstra as an alternative in that case.

¹ estimated limit based on average user, discussion and post count of all forums

Inactive/too active forums are archived to save on server resources
FreeFlarum checks for inactive/way too active forums every 3 months. By "inactive", I mean forums that have existed for at least 1 month and haven't had any new users or posts for that month (or simply have less than 1 posts, regardless of other factors). By "too active", I mean forums that have more than 20 000 (offline) users, 20 000 discussions or 35 000 posts (exceptions can be made based on certain criteria and/or rare edge cases).
These forums are archived, and inactive forums can be reactivated/restored for 6 months before they are fully erased from FreeFlarum (too active forums are not eligible for reactivation, because big forums are problematic for FreeFlarum). If your forum was archived, please contact me and I will reactivate it or send you an E-mail with your data, if possible.

Questions and inquiries can be directed to our Discuss thread or via E-mail
If you run into any issues, please contact me via details found on FreeFlarum's support page.

Fun fact: this is an important excerpt of our Terms & Conditions. It is recommended that you read them entirely, as forums that do not comply with them will be removed.

With that out of the way, let's have a look at how to get started with your new community!

🌀🛠 Adjust your forum's settings

You can go to the administration area and edit your forum's settings and appearance to better represent your community. It is possible to change things such as your forum colors, logo, keywords, name and even custom CSS, header and footer.

💭✏ Create quality content

Engaging and interesting content is a foundation for every successful forum. Try to offer something unique to your users, to provide a variety of new and exciting ideas that you can discuss together.

🧩⚡ Use the power of extensions

FreeFlarum comes with many community provided Flarum extensions. Use them to your advantage and invent new & creative ideas to utilize Flarum's full potential of its extensibility.

🗣👈🏼 Keep in touch with your community

Communication is important. Make sure to share updates and announcements about your forum with your community.

🧹🧽 Clean your forum from time to time

Occasionally, you will encounter forum members that do not share the same opinions as you and your users do. This is okay - for as long as they express them in a polite and harmless manner. You are the moderator of your own community. Ensure that it is spam-free and does not contain any content that might be viewed as offensive or harmful.

That's it! If you read through all of this, thank you! You are now one step closer towards building the community of your dreams (or at least you'll try out the amazing features Flarum has to offer). You may safely remove this discussion now, by clicking on the drop-down next to the "Reply" button, and finally on "Delete".

As always, if you ran into any trouble or need an assistance, you may reach out to me through our support page. Don't forget to tell me your forum name, so that I can actually fix your issue!

Important links and resources:

FreeFlarum:
- FreeFlarum's Discuss thread (preferred form of communication) - used for general questions and to share updates about FreeFlarum
- @FreeFlarum at Twitter - for status updates and announcements about downtime
Flarum:
- Official Flarum.org website - learn more about Flarum and why it's so great
- Discuss - Flarum's discussion forum - please, use only our thread for FreeFlarum support!
Other relevant links:
- Extiverse - A public collection of Flarum extensions
- FreeFlarum's GitHub - request an extension to be included at FreeFlarum

That's all for now. Good luck with your community!
~ @SKevo

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