Hello!

🥳 Congratulations with your brand new Cloudhound forum! The Free Flarum mission is to help people start independent communities, and we are keen to make yours a success. 🚀 Here are 10 cool things to do with your new forum.

1. Use your admin powers 🏋️‍♂️

You have received a mail with your new password. Click login (top-right). Then, click admin and Administration. Here is where you configure the look & feel of your forum, and where you can enable cool features (called "extensions").

2. Pimp your forum 💍

A standard forum looks boring, right? No worries, there are many ways to style your forum. Start by adding a logo & a favorite icon and change the standard colors. All this is done under the Appearance section in the admin panel. If you are feeling really adventurous, you can add custom CSS/Less to give your forum a bit of eye candy.

3. Set up your own language 🇦🇪

English is the default language, but many other languages are supported. Go to extensions in the admin panel and search for your language, then enable it. You can also configure Flarum to use this as the default language, if most of your members use that.

4. Use your own domain name 🌐

Free Flarum allows you to use your own domain name. Besides looking look/professional, it helps you if you ever decide to move your forum elsewhere, because you won't be tied to the Free Flarum address. To do this, you should register a domainname elsewhere (for example with Namecheap). Then go to Free Flarum Settings and enter your domain name. Voila!

5. Create an introduction for new members 👨‍🎓

Create a Sticky post, explaining the objective of your forum, the rules to join, etcetera. Don't be a dictator writing pages full of regulation, because nobody likes to join a prison 😀 You should write something to inspire new members and motivate them to contribute.

6. Create interesting posts ✏️

A forum requires interesting content for people to return. Right now, there isn't much here 😉 So let's change that! Good content is meaningful, useful, entertaining. Write something about your expertise. The news from your sports club. An opinionated essay. Make sure that people think: I hope s/he will post most like this!.

7. Invite people 💌

A forum without users isn't really a forum, is it? So let's invite your friends, colleagues, neighbours over. The first members of your forum should be active contributors as to get the discussions started. So ask the first members to write a few posts with meaningful content.

8. Use tags 📚️

Once you have many posts, you can organize them around subjects ("tags"). To do that, first enable the Tag Extension, then go to the Tags section and add a couple of categories. Guidelines: don't make too many tags, especially if you don't have posts for them yet. Tip: create content first, organize later!

9. Nurture your forum 🌿

As they say: everything that gets positive attention will grow. So come back often, and add new posts, guide new members and ensure your forum stays a welcome, inspiring place for all your members.

10. Remove this post ❌

Congratulations for making it to number 10. You can now safely remove this post 😉 Make sure you are logged in as admin, then click delete right underneath this story.

Finally, here are some useful links:

Good luck with your forum and building your community!
Team FreeFlarum