AddThisFeature

Discussion Forum

Give users a public place to ask questions and answer each other.

involved Engagement

What it adds

Topic boards containing user-created threads with replies, moderation controls, and permalinks.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Ship boards, threads, replies, and a single level of nesting. Resist arbitrary-depth reply trees, reputation scores, badges, and private subforums until people are actually posting; each of those is a feature in its own right.

  2. 2

    Reuse Comments and Mentions for the reply composer, mention parsing, and content rendering rather than writing a second editor with its own escaping rules.

  3. 3

    Route reported and held posts into the existing Moderation Queue and reuse AI Text Content Moderation and Content Reporting if present. Do not build a forum-specific moderation inbox alongside the one the app already has.

  4. 4

    Give every thread and every post a stable permalink that survives being pinned, locked, moved between boards, or merged into another thread.

  5. 5

    Do not send an email for every reply. Route notifications through the existing Notification Digests so a busy thread produces one summary rather than forty separate messages.

Edge cases it handles

8
  • Deep reply chains become unreadable when each level indents further. Cap the visible nesting depth and show deeper replies as flat with a quoted parent reference instead of running off the right edge on a phone.
  • Moderator actions must not break links. Pinning, locking, moving, and merging threads all need to leave old permalinks resolving, redirecting where necessary rather than returning a not-found.
  • A user posting five threads a minute is either a bot or a problem. Throttle rapid repeat posting per account and per address, and detect near-identical bodies posted repeatedly.
  • Deleting a parent post must not take its replies with it. Replace the body with a tombstone so the conversation still reads, and keep the child replies attached.
  • Notifying every participant on every reply drives people to mute the forum entirely. Batch notifications, respect per-thread mute, and let a user unsubscribe from a thread they started.
  • Public user-generated content is a spam and abuse target from day one. Require an account with a confirmed email to post, hold first posts from new accounts for review, and strip links from unverified authors.
  • Threads grow past what one page can show. Paginate deterministically so a permalink to reply four hundred lands on the right page even after earlier replies are deleted.
  • Forum content will be indexed by search engines. Decide whether that is wanted, and make sure locked, hidden, and moderated posts are excluded from both the sitemap and the app's own Global Search.

Definition of done

9
  • Users can create threads on a board and reply to each other, with replies rendered readably on a phone.
  • Visible nesting is capped and deeper replies remain legible without horizontal scrolling.
  • Pinning, locking, moving, and merging a thread leave every existing permalink resolving.
  • Deleting a post preserves its replies and leaves a tombstone in place.
  • Rapid repeat posting is throttled and near-duplicate posts are detected.
  • Participants receive batched notifications and can mute a thread.
  • Moderated and hidden posts are excluded from search and from public indexing.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.