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Introduction

As of Fossil 2.7, Fossil includes a built-in discussion forum feature.

Any project complex enough to be managed by Fossil can probably benefit from having a discussion forum. Even if your project has a discussion forum already, there are further benefits that stem from using Fossil's built-in forum feature:

Setting up a Fossil Forum

Permissions

Fossil forums use the same role-based access control mechanism as for normal Fossil repository logins.

There are several dedicated permsissions for forums:

By default, no Fossil user has permission to use the forums except for users with Setup and Admin capabilities, which get these as part of the large package of other capabilities they get.

For public Fossil repositories that wish to accept new users without involving a human, go into Admin → Access and enable the "Allow users to register themselves" setting. You may also wish to give the anonymous user category the Read Forum (2) and Write Forum (3) capabilities: this allows people to post without creating an account simply by solving a simple CAPTCHA.

For a private repository, you probably won't want to give the anonymous user any forum access, but you may wish to give capability "2" to the reader user category.

For either type of repository, you are likely to want to give at least the Write Trusted (4) capability to the developer user category.

By following this advice, you should not need to tediously add capabilities to individual accounts, except in atypical cases, such as to grant the Moderate Forum capability (5) to an uncommonly highly-trusted user.

Skin Setup

If you create a new Fossil repository with version 2.7 or newer, its default skin is already set up correctly for typical forum configurations.

Those upgrading existing repositories will need to edit the Header part of their existing Fossil skin in Admin → Skins, adding something like this to create the navbar link: 

  if {[anycap 23456] || [anoncap 2] || [anoncap 3]} {
    menulink /forum Forum
  }

These rules say that any logged-in user with any forum-related capability (2-6 inclusive, as of this writing) or an anonymous user with read or write capability on the forum (2, 3) will see the "Forum" navbar link, which just takes you to /forum.

The exact code you need here varies depending on which skin you're using. Follow the style you see for the other navbar links.

Single Sign-On

If you choose to host your discussion forums within the same repository as your project's other Fossil-managed content, you inherently have a single sign-on system. Contrast third-party mailing list and forum software where you either end up with two separate user tables and permission sets, or you must go to significant effort to integrate the two login systems.

You may instead choose to host your forums in a separate Fossil repository from your other assets. A good reason to do this is that you have a public project where very few of those participating in the forum have special permissions for assets managed by Fossil for the project itself, so you wish to segregate the two user sets.

Fossil offers a way to split the difference: you can host your forum in a repository separate from your other Fossil-managed content yet still have single sign-on for that common set of users that will have logins on both repositories. Simply enable Fossil's login groups feature in Admin → Login-Group, which allows one Fossil repository to recognize users authorized on another repository.

Email Notification

See the email notification design document for now. More administration-oriented documentation TODO.

Moderation

TODO

Troubleshooting

TODO