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Public Voice — A completely custom-built discussion forum

Public Voice · 1 week ago · 5 replies · 160

Hi everyone!

I'm a graphic designer and developer, and I've spent the last few months designing and building Public Voice, a new independent discussion platform.

I've always loved smaller online communities and traditional forums, and wanted to create something with that same spirit but a clean, modern interface.

One thing that makes Public Voice a little different is that it's completely custom-built. It's not running on XenForo, vBulletin, phpBB or any other existing forum software. I've designed and developed the platform itself, with particular attention to the UI/UX and how conversations work.

It's a general discussion space where anyone can start Threads, join conversations, share photographs, music, interesting websites, things they've made, or just waffle about whatever interests them.

There are no likes, karma points or follower counts. Just conversations, with useful features like contextual Notes, activity feeds, saved Threads and a customisable homepage.

What's next?

I'm planning to introduce Spaces, allowing people to create their own public or private Spaces, essentially giving them their own version of Public Voice to use however they wish and create their own community.

For now, though, it's one shared forum where everyone's welcome.

Come and join us!

It's live and fully functional, although the community is still very small. I'd love to welcome some new members, get a few more conversations going and hear what people think.

If you fancy signing up, sharing something you've made or starting a conversation, please do!

https://publicvoice.co/

I'd particularly welcome feedback from other forum owners and enthusiasts on the design, features or anything you think could be added or improved.

Cheers,
Leon

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5 replies
Gizmo · 1 week ago

I signed up :)

Public Voice OP · 1 week ago

On Oct 14, 2026, Gizmo Borden said:

I signed up :)

I saw! Thank you, and welcome :)

King --BOOM-- Boo · 1 week ago

I like anything that is different from the norm. I do like the way it is set up. Took a few seconds to figure it out but once I did, it was easy to navigate. Question though: if you get 1000s of topics, how would it be sorted? It looks like they are all to the left. Would it be 100s of pages?

Public Voice OP · 1 week ago

On Oct 14, 2026, King --BOOM-- Boo said:

I like anything that is different from the norm. I do like the way it is set up. Took a few seconds to figure it out but once I did, it was easy to navigate. Question though: if you get 1000s of topics, how would it be sorted? It looks like they are all to the left. Would it be 100s of pages?

Hey, thanks for the input. That's a valid question. At the moment I've deliberately kept everything as a single list of threads, because I like the simplicity of having all the conversations in one place while the community is still small. It also avoids having lots of largely empty topics.

The list is paginated, but you're right that if there were thousands of threads, it wouldn't be particularly practical to navigate through hundreds of pages.

I've actually already built support for topics into the underlying architecture, but haven't enabled them in the interface yet. The idea is to introduce categorisation when the volume of conversations makes it worthwhile, rather than complicating things unnecessarily at this stage.

I'm also working on Spaces, which will allow people to create their own personal forum within Public Voice, with the option to organise conversations into custom topics or simply keep everything in a single thread list.

King --BOOM-- Boo · 1 week ago

Cool! It's good to hear you have plans for the future and currently everything is looking great!

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