Forum

The forum turns your marketplace into a community. Members start topics, reply to each other and come back to follow the conversation, which keeps them on your site between purchases. It works well for niche markets where people share know-how: classic cars, horses, farming equipment, collectibles.

The forum lives at /forum. You create the forums (the boards topics are filed under), members write the topics and replies, and you moderate from the admin panel.

Switch the forum on and create your forums

In the admin panel, go to Addons.
Open Forums and click Enable. The page then shows a Forums list.
Click New Forum.
Fill in the forum’s Name and Description, choose a Parent forum if it belongs inside another one, and click Save.
Repeat for each forum you want.

Members can’t post until at least one forum exists. Start with a handful, such as General, Buying advice, Show and tell and Site feedback, and add more as conversations grow.

Forum settings

Setting	What it does
Name	The forum’s name, shown on `/forum` and in the topic form.
Parent forum	None for a top-level forum, or the forum this one sits inside.
Description	A line or two on what belongs in the forum, shown on the forums page.
SEO name	The forum’s address, `/forum/seo-name`. Made from the name if you leave it empty.

Reorder or remove forums

On Addons › Forums, drag forums to change their order or to move one inside another; the order is saved when you drop it. Click a forum to edit it. Editing a forum also lets you delete it.

How members use the forum

Who	What they can do
Visitors	Read every forum, topic and reply, and search the forum.
Signed-in members	Start a topic with New Topic (title, forum and text) and reply with Reply under any topic.
Members who took part in a topic	Get an email when someone else replies to it.

Rules that apply to every topic and reply:

Titles need at least 5 characters; the text of a topic or reply between 5 and 1,000 characters.
If captcha is switched on for your site, members fill it in before posting.
Words on your banned words list are blocked or replaced, as in listings.
If you use Akismet (see Fight spam), posts it flags as spam are refused.
Topics and replies are published straight away; there is no approval queue, so moderate after the fact.

If Notify Me on New Listing is switched on in Email settings, you also get an email each time a new topic is started. The emails use the new-forum-answer email template.

Moderate topics and replies

While the forum is on, Forum appears in the sidebar under Manage. It lists every topic and reply, newest first, with search by title and filters by forum and status.

Go to Forum in the sidebar.
Find the post with the search box or the forum and status filters.
Edit it to change its title, text, forum or address, or untick it to deactivate it. Deactivated posts disappear from the forum but are kept.
Delete it if it should go for good.

While you browse the forum signed in as an administrator, an Edit button next to each topic and reply takes you straight to it.

Replies are listed too, with the start of their text as the title. Deactivating a topic hides the whole thread.

Forum addresses and feeds

Address	What it shows
`/forum`	All forums.
`/forum/forum-seo-name`	The topics in one forum, with the date of each topic’s last message and its number of replies.
`/forum/forum-seo-name/topic-address.html`	A topic and its replies.
`/rss/forum.xml`	RSS feed of new topics in all forums.
`/rss/forum/forum-seo-name.xml`	RSS feed of one forum.

While you haven’t built your own menu, the Nova theme adds Forums to the top menu. With a custom menu, add a link to /forum yourself.

Turn the whole site into a forum

Some owners use Yclas mainly as a forum or a community board. If that’s your plan, rename the words on your site with Translations (for example “listing” to “post” and “category” to “board”), and keep the listing form short in Publishing options.

Messaging between members — private conversations instead of public ones.
Black list and banned words — keep the forum clean.
Email templates — change the reply notification.
Add-ons — every optional feature you can switch on.