Our newest release brings a solid round of improvements to ForumSpark. On the surface, there isn’t a huge amount that changes for you as an admin - but under the hood, this update strengthens the foundation in a big way.

ForumSpark is now in a much stronger position when it comes to global regulations like GDPR, the UK Online Safety Act, and similar compliance requirements. This release focuses on privacy, accountability, and long-term stability - making sure your community is not just running smoothly, but running responsibly.

Features

• Download My Data: Users can request a copy of their personal data, including account information, posts, topics, and private messages. Export is generated as a JSON file
• Individual user registration now requires Terms of Service acceptance
• Added “I confirm I am at least 18 years old” checkbox at board registration
• New Advanced sidebar section in Admin with a Security Logs page (login, logout, registration, password reset/change, email change, account deletion, and lockout activity)
• Store IP address on user registration and on each reply/post: IPs are now visible to admins/moderators in reply headers, user profiles, and ACP member list
• Add dedicated /user/delete-account page with password confirmation

🛠 Improvements

• Removal of timezone selection box during registration
• Improved report system with status workflow for replies, users, and private messages

I want to add that these were necessary changes to ensure ForumSpark has a strong and promising future. We’ve focused on privacy, accountability, and long-term stability so the platform is properly aligned with global regulations like GDPR and the UK Online Safety Act.

From here, my focus shifts toward improving stability even further, introducing new features, and making ForumSpark more modern and flexible across the board.

As always, you’re free to guide us toward what should come next.

Hello everyone,

We’ve updated ForumSpark’s Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Legal Framework.

This update improves clarity, strengthens our content and moderation policies, and better reflects our compliance with current regulations, including GDPR and the UK Online Safety Act. The structure has been refined and expanded to more clearly outline:

• User responsibilities
• Content guidelines and enforcement
• Account and billing policies
• Data protection and privacy practices
• Copyright and reporting procedures

There are no major changes to how you use the platform day-to-day, but the documents now provide clearer explanations and more detailed language regarding how ForumSpark operates and protects both users and the platform.

We encourage all members to review the updated Terms and Privacy Policy at their convenience.
You may also find a link on our homepage's footer.
https://forumspark.net/terms

By continuing to use ForumSpark, you acknowledge and agree to the revised Terms.
As a result, I will soon have more information regarding new features for your members according to these TOS.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

This release includes several more quality-of-life improvements, such as the ability to toggle between relative and absolute timestamps and a new setting to disable auto-subscription when replying to topics. Key bug fixes include improved filtering in the weekly digest, which now ranks posts based on recent replies rather than view activity. Mobile layout has also been refined: moderator actions are now tucked into a dropdown, keeping primary actions like quote, multiquote, and react easily accessible.

Most notably, this update introduces optional membership approvals, allowing admins to review and approve new user accounts before they can log in.

Full changelog below:

Features

• Add auto watch replies setting
• (menu) Open external links in new tab
• Add relative time toggle
• (web) Add abuse report page
• Require admin approval for new users
• Add unsubscribe message to weekly digest

Bug Fixes

• (admin) Add pagination to theme list
• Restrict username tooltips to mouse hover
• (admin) Restore selected page when editing menu item
• Filter weekly digest by last reply rather than last update time
• Ensure in-app notification resolution is more resiliant
• Ensure topic templates do not allow content to be null
• Improve layout of reply action on mobile

This release brings several quality-of-life improvements and new features aimed at boosting engagement and ease of use.

Most notably, we've introduced email notifications for watched topics and a new weekly digest to help bring users back into the conversation. You’ll also find multiquote support, making it much easier to reply to multiple posts at once.

The default theme has also gone through a small round of polishing to start to mature the design.

See the full changelog below:

Features

• Filter users by username in admin API
• Add <!-- BOARDSTATS --> theme token with board stats panel
• Show admin welcome on first login
• Multiquoting and insertion into replies
• Polish default theme
• Add extra html to forum row stats for better theming
• Add email notifications for watched topics
• Add weekly digest email to re-engage users
• Add class to body to better identify pages for theming

Bug Fixes

• Parse bot names from user agent in active user list
• Emoticon and reactions optmisations

I have been queuing up a few changes and thought it would be good to push these up as the release includes a bunch of quality of life improvements. For the full list of changes please see below:

Features

• Add moderation queue badge to ModCP menu
• Create default forums with permissions
• Email board owner with welcome email after creation
• Board creation wizard ux improvements (autofocusing)
• Optimisation: Reuse member tooltip across page
• Conditionally display reaction controls
• Include guests and bots in active user list
• Add skip links
• Simple Theme export and import via json
• Allow setting default user avatar
• Improve reactions popover by using Tippy
• Hide emoticon box when none exist
• Abbreviate join date in user profile

Bug Fixes

• Retain input after validation errors on post create screen
• Wait for theme styles before taking theme screenshot
• Prevent stale theme selection after session expires

Features

• Ability to select a best answer in forums with the feature enabled
• Ability to view poll results before voting
• BREAKING replace frontend_secret with short lived JWTs for frontend extensions (documentation to follow)
• Admin can remove 2FA for user via admin panel
• Admin can remove avatar for user via admin panel
• BREAKING Drop name entirely in favour of usernamme
• Ability to promote users to new user group based on post count
• Replace Livewire session expired alert with a user friendly modal
• Allow admin to remove board favicon if one was previously set.

Bug Fixes

• Add noreferrer to external links
• Mark new topics as read for the author
• Maintain (new) mentions if a user changes their name
• Favicon alert counter now sets immediately on page load
• Remove whitespace gap for newest member in board stats

Miscellaneous Tasks

• Minor cleanups with internal documentation

In the interest of transparency, I wanted to share a quick update on what’s currently in development for ForumSpark. This should give you a good idea of where things are headed and what to expect over the next few versions.

Coming in Release 1.2.6

The next release includes a number of new features and a couple of breaking changes for those building extensions or integrations.

New features and improvements:

• You’ll be able to mark a post as the best answer in forums where this feature is enabled.
• Poll results can now be viewed before you vote, if the poll allows it.
• Admins will be able to remove a user’s avatar and reset 2FA directly from the admin panel.
• Automatic promotion to a new user group based on post count will be possible.
• The "session expired" warning has been replaced with a cleaner, more user-friendly modal.
• Admins can now remove a board favicon if one was previously set.

Breaking changes:

• The frontend_secret used by frontend extensions is being replaced with short-lived JWT tokens. Documentation will follow.
• The name field is being dropped entirely in favour of username.

Built but not yet released

These features have already been merged and will be included in a future release:

• Improved spam detection via new heuristic rules.
• Users can block incoming messages or conversations from others.

Currently in development

A number of new features are actively being worked on. Some are nearly complete, others are still in progress:

• Command palette for fast, keyboard-driven navigation across the forum.
• Multiquote support, now in final polish.
• New custom profile field types: dropdowns and radio buttons.
• Guest and bot visibility in the online users list.
• Weekly digest emails highlighting new and active topics.
• General email notifications for replies, mentions, and other interactions.
• Post attachments, allowing file uploads in posts.
• Filtering topics by label within individual forums.

There are also several smaller improvements and some early groundwork being laid for future features.

If you have any feedback, suggestions, or things you’d like to see added to the roadmap, feel free to share them.

1.2.5 is a hotfix release to patch the creation of boards.

It was reported that it was not possible to create a new board due to a 404 error appearing when typing in the board creation form. This was due to a collision in middleware preventing access from the main domain to Livewire routes.

This has now been fixed and a regression test added to prevent it from ocurring again.

Features

• Admins now have the ability to remove avatars from a user via the admin area
• New Merge Topic moderation action
• Groups can now be allocated as moderators to forums

Bug Fixes

• Timezones are now generated based on environment rather than a hard-coded list
• Admin user form did not previously select current user group for user

Other

• Query optimisation in topic watchers
• Minor optimisation in how the next member number is allocated

https://headwayapp.co/forumspark-changelog/1-2-4-2025-06-06-316889

Changelog

[1.2.3] - 2025-04-20

Features

• Add custom menu management
• Filter banned users from board statistics

Bug Fixes

• Add missing migration
• Tenant default file_storage value
• Fix issue where user ranks would not be recalculated during rank deletion
• Fix issue where custom profile field maximum length would be exceeded

Our hosting provider will be performing scheduled network maintenance on 18/03/2025 20:00 UTC until 18/03/2025 23:00 UTC.

During this time you may experience delays, failures or short term outages. Disruption will be kept to a minimum during this period.

Sorry I did not post an update already but here are the main things that have changed in the most recent versions.

Most notably are the changes to the theme css editor to improve theme dev experience when editing a theme through the admin, and that themes now apply to guest / non-authenticated pages (ie. login / register).

Additionally it is now possible to create themes that have the option of a sidebar. You can use new theme tokens <!-- USERSONLINE --> <!-- RECENTACTIVITY -->, <!-- RECENTLYONLINE --> and <!-- SHOUTBOX --> to include additional panels in your theme layout. More documentation will follow, in the meantime checkout my Flux theme for an example.

Full changelog below.

[1.2.2] - 2025-02-05

Features

• Theme stylesheet editor no refresh on save and autosaving
• Add save keyboard shortcut to theme css editor

Bug Fixes

• Guest layout for error pages causes exception
• Better error handling on board registration
• Active topics no longer include first post in count

Miscellaneous Tasks

• Update marketing cta wording

[1.2.1] - 2025-01-30

Features

• Add guest layout to themes
• Web component modal response to dark mode setting

[1.2.0] - 2025-01-30

Features

• Show notification count in favicon
• Additional theme tokens for panels
• Apply board theme to auth screens

Bug Fixes

• Js error on guest layout initialising user
• Shoutbox multiple livewire roots
• Spelling error moderator panel
• ToDataURL on favicon counter
• Do not show reactions div if no reactions related to post

[1.1.6] - 2025-01-28

Features

• Increase template and layout sizes to 10k and 50k respectively

Bug Fixes

• Webhook topics should allow more than one subscription
• Users endpoint not returning user
• Board time layout when viewing as guest in mobile

[1.1.5] - 2025-01-23

Features

• Latest user is now determined by creation time and not id

Bug Fixes

• More strict with worker jobs and multi-tenancy

I've now implemented the ability for users to watch topics and be notified of replies.

For now, if you create a topic or reply to one, you are automatically subscribed to updates. If you wish to stop receiving updates, you can click the 'Unwatch' button next to the reply button on the topic page.

You can choose to watch a topic without replying, this is done by clicking the 'Watch' button next to the Add Reply button on the topic screen.

I intend to make it possible for you to reply to a topic without also subscribing but this was just the first step in a series of improvements to the notification system that I intend to make :)

As a small aside: I have now started to tag ForumSpark with version numbers to make Changelogs easier to see.

Hey all!

I have now pushed quite a substantial release for ForumSpark. I've outlined the main areas below but please take a look at the changelog to see a full list of updates :)

New Look

As you will have noticed, Forum Spark has a new look. Whilst the purple and orange was a good nod to the past, we felt that it was best that we came up with our own look.

Now, I’m no designer but I tried to keep the look clean and professional so that maintains that ‘easy to use’ feel.

The old purple and orange has not gone away completely, and for anyone interested, it will be available soon to download and use. You can already find assets and source files in our GitHub https://github.com/forumspark/nostalgia-theme.

With the new theme, I’ve taken a great deal of time to go through and make sure all HTML is marked up with component classes rather than the Tailwind classes. This should make it easier for you to develop new themes.

I also introduced a Global Dark Mode toggle which theme designers can access and use in their themes (more information to follow)

API & Webhooks

Behind the scenes I’ve been working to build an API to allow developers to build extensions. This is a very pragmatic API but should open up a world of possibilities to extend the capabilities of your boards.

You can see the API documented in our Documentation: https://docs.forumspark.net/api/ and the full Admin API spec can be found here https://forumspark.net/api .

Other updates

I have been making lots of little updates throughout this last week and have updated our Changelog with a list of all of the changes.

Please let me know if you notice any issues of course!

We will be making improvements all round to the theme development experience.

There are still some remnants of Tailwind classes but I am making a concentrated effort to remove them in favour of more structured css. This should make overriding of things much easier.

Obviously, if you are intending to develop themes for Forum Spark in the meantime, please be aware that some things will be tricky to override or that some class names / structures may change.

We're also working on the ability to create themes that do not inherit from the base theme, as they currently do.

And finally, as alluded to in the APIs topic we're also working on a CLI tool assist in theme development workflows:

Preview (forgive the crudeness of the demo)

For anyone wondering, it will soon be possible to allocate custom domains to Forum Spark.

We do currently have that available as a feature but it is currently turned off as I need to perform a small amount of infrastructure work. This will be available in the coming weeks.

Users should have the ability to request account deletion.

Users should have the ability to download all data that relates to them, this should include:

• User record (username, name, email etc)
• Topics
• Posts
• Shouts
• Historical name change requests
• Any data current session related data (ip and user agent)
• Topic read history
• Toll voting history

Thanks @Hulk for mentioning this in the service discussion forum.

Right now you get notifications of tags, reactions and replies to threads you create. These are just in-app notifications though which are great for live sessions but not ideal for users who have gone offline.

We would like to extend the notifications to include optional Emails and Push Notifications (PWA).

In addition to this we would also like to include a broader range of notifications including the ability to watch and be updated about topics of interest.

These will eventually all be optional.

Hi everyone,

We’ve set up a Discord server for ForumSpark. It’s a great place to hang out, chat with others, and share ideas about building and managing your communities. We'll develop the server further as we see fit.

Here’s what you can do on our Discord:

• Connect with other ForumSpark users in real-time.
• Share tips, tricks, and inspiration.
• Stay updated on the latest news and announcements.

Just a quick heads-up:
We don’t offer support through Discord. If you need help with ForumSpark, please use the support forums where we can assist you more effectively.

Here’s the link: https://discord.gg/BQM4jRHpGr

Looking forward to seeing you there!

– The ForumSpark Team

It is intended for ForumSpark to have an accessible API so that you are able to add features to your board.

This will take place in 2 stages:

The first is an implementation of a 'simple' admin level API. This will allow owners to create scoped personal access tokens. These scoped tokens will have access to a range of REST based API endpoints that can be called to manipulate the board (think creating posts / topics, direct messages, updating user data). The tokens will also have the ability to listen to webhook events to be able to respond when something happens (e.g. a topic is created, a post is made).

This simple API will open the door to allow developers to create extensions to the platform.

The second stage will be an implementation of OAuth for API authentication. This will allow for more tight integration with the platform to be able to create 'apps'. The API endpoints will likely be the same (or similar) but the authentication mechanism will change.

Additional Javascript APIs will be added to also aid with development of frontend extensions.

Example Use cases:

1. A theme development kit (see theme topic to follow) that allows theme developers to use their own build tools locally and synchronise the theme to a board without having to use the admin interface. This opens up the possiblities of using source control for themes. Preview (forgive the crudeness of the demo)
2. Extensions like currency and money systems. Webhooks allow an extension to listen to forum activity and react accordingly. On the frontend it should be possible to show user monetary values and perform actions like donations or shop purchases.