Cedric, founder of ForumSpark
I want to do this properly. Not a wall of bullet points, not a "we're thrilled to announce." Just me telling you what changed, the way I'd tell a friend over coffee or a beer.
ForumSpark 2.0 has been the better part of almost a year of work, and it is easily the biggest thing I have ever built. So let me start with the part that matters most to the people who have been here a while.
A promise, not a launch-week softener
Every forum running today stays exactly as it is. Free, forever, no catch. You keep everything you have, you keep getting the security and reliability fixes, and nobody is going to email you saying your community now costs money.
2.0 is a new edition that sits alongside the old one. If you love what you have, do nothing. If you want the new stuff, you upgrade when you are ready, and existing owners get half off for the first year as a thank you for being early. That is it. No pressure, no dark patterns.
Now, the fun part. What is actually new.
The whole public side has been redrawn from scratch. New home, new topic pages, a proper light and dark mode that every visitor can flip for themselves and that remembers their choice. It reads well on a phone, it loads fast, and the reactions, best-answer marking and live updates all feel like software people are used to in 2026, not 2006.
And I mean live. Replies show up without a refresh. You can see who else is reading the same thread. Someone starts typing and you know. It is a small thing until you feel it, and then going back feels strange.
You can now turn any forum into a proper question-and-answer space. The first post is the question, replies are answers, members vote for the ones that actually helped, and the accepted answer sits right at the top where the next person will find it instead of buried on page four.
Threads got smarter in smaller ways too. A single topic can carry several labels at once, so something can be tagged Bug and Resolved and Urgent and still be filtered on. You can mark a reply as the best answer and pin it under the question. If a reply genuinely saves someone's day, they can tip it with credits. And the forum quietly remembers where you stopped reading, so a two-hundred-reply thread greets you with "jump back to where you left off" instead of making you scroll for it.
This is the part I am proudest of. Three visual editors, all drag and drop, none of them asking you to touch a line of code.
Theme Studio lets you restyle your entire forum by dragging sliders and picking colours, previewing on your real board as you go. Do not want to fiddle? Describe the vibe you are after, "cozy retro gaming den, dark and moody," and it builds you a full light and dark theme to start from. Upload your logo and it will pull a palette out of that instead.
Widget Studio is for arranging the pieces of every page. Drag things into the sidebar, the header, the footer, a profile, and decide what shows where. Your home page, your forums and your clubs can each look completely different if you want them to.
Page Studio is the big one. It turns your forum into a full website. You drag designed sections onto a canvas, click any text to edit it in place, and drop in live blocks that pull straight from your community: trending threads, your newest members, stats that count up as people scroll. You can make one of these pages your actual front door, and your forum politely moves to a /forums address without breaking a single link.
If a blank canvas is not your thing, describe your community in a sentence and the AI writes you a finished page. And it is not making things up, it reads your real forums, your busiest topics, your actual member count, and writes copy about your community specifically. Then you can just tell it "add a section about our monthly tournaments" and it edits what it made. It is genuinely a little uncanny the first time.
I did not want to bolt a chatbot onto a forum and call it innovation. So the AI shows up in exactly the spots where it saves your members real time, and every bit of it is built from your own community's posts, never the open internet.
Long thread you do not have time for? One tap gives you the key points, each linked back to the post it came from, plus a line on where the thread actually landed. Got a question? Ask the forum in plain language and get one clear answer stitched together from real posts, with every source cited, and it will tell you honestly when the forum does not have an answer rather than inventing one.
Helpful and sourced, or not there at all. That is the whole philosophy.
If your community is the kind of place where it makes sense, the tools are all here now. Sell downloads, documents and services through a marketplace. Run paid clubs, member subscriptions and a credits economy. Publish a proper blog, or open a media gallery your members fill with photos. None of it is required, and nobody gets nickel-and-dimed into it. Your revenue, your rules.
There is more for actually running the place, too. Send branded announcement emails to your members and see who opened and clicked. Tune how your board shows up in Google and on social, with a share image and a live preview so you know exactly what a link will look like. Search is fast and forgiving of typos now. And if you are coming from another forum, you can bring it across yourself, right inside the admin. On the higher plans you also get a direct line to me and the team when you need a hand.
New members now earn their way into more of the forum as they stick around and contribute. That does two nice things at once: it gives your regulars something to climb toward, and it quietly shuts the door on drive-by spammers before they can drop a single link. On top of that there are achievements and reputation, so the people who make your community worth showing up for actually get seen for it.
I am not going to pretend everything on my list is done. Affiliate tools and an ad manager are still on the bench, and I would rather ship those right than rush them onto a pricing page. They will come.
A launch this size is never truly finished on day one. There will be fine-tuning to do, a few bugs to shake out, and a fair bit of quiet maintenance over the coming months. I have tested everything I could, but the truth is a busy production forum with real people on it is never quite the same animal as my laptop or the staging server. So please bear with me while I smooth the rough edges. And if you run into something broken, tell us. An honest bug report is genuinely one of the most useful things you can send my way.
Try ForumSpark free for 30 days, no card needed.
If you have been running a community on the old ForumSpark, thank you for sticking around. If you are new, there is a 30-day trial with no card needed, and plans start at five euros a month with unlimited members on every single one. Storage is the only thing that ever scales. Getting popular will never cost you more.
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