Frequently asked questions

No. ABDA is an independent app made by the ForumCopilot team. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., the makers of Discourse. It talks to forums through the public API that Discourse ships with.

Yes, and there are no ads and no accounts to buy. The app that runs inside each forum is open source under the MIT licence.

The easiest way is to list it on discover.discourse.org — we refresh our directory from that list regularly, so forums added there get picked up on their own. You can also email [email protected] with the address and we will add it in the next update. A self-service way to submit a forum is planned. Either way, listing is free, and anyone can already open your forum today by typing its address into the app, whether it is listed or not.

No. ABDA uses the REST API and User API Keys that every Discourse install already has. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, and no access to your database or admin panel.

Notifications are optional, and you turn them on per forum. The forum's own page asks you to grant the app a second key that can only read your notifications. The app hands that key to our notification server, which checks the forum for anything new about once a minute and sends it to your phone through Apple's or Google's push service. It works on any forum, with nothing for the forum's admins to set up. Turn notifications off or sign out, and the server deletes the key and revokes it on the forum.

Because every Discourse forum keeps its own members. There is no shared account across forums, and ABDA does not add one. You can read most public forums without signing in at all; you only need an account where you want to post, react or get notified.

No. Signing in happens on the forum's own web page. When you approve, the forum hands the app a key that is stored in your device's secure storage — Keychain on iOS, encrypted storage on Android. Signing out revokes that key on the forum.

Nothing, unless you turn notifications on. There are no accounts, no analytics and no advertising identifiers, and your posts and messages go directly to the forum you are using, under that forum's own privacy policy. For forums where you turn notifications on, our server keeps the notifications-only key, your username and user id on that forum, and your device's push token, and deletes them when you turn notifications off or sign out. The privacy policy has the detail.

Yes. ABDA is the multi-forum edition of an open-source single-forum app, so a branded app for one community is a supported path. Fork discourse-app and build it yourself, or email [email protected] and we will do the branding, push setup and the App Store and Google Play submissions for you.

The app that runs inside a forum is open source: github.com/forumcopilot/discourse-app, Flutter, MIT licensed. Point it at a forum address, add a name, icon and colours, and you have your own app. The multi-forum directory and chooser that make up ABDA are not part of that repository.

Android phones and tablets — ABDA is on Google Play — and iPhone and iPad, where it is coming soon to the App Store. The underlying open-source project also runs on macOS if you build it yourself.

Check that the address is right and that the forum actually runs Discourse. Some forums put Cloudflare or a login wall in front of everything, and a few disable API access for apps — in those cases the forum's admins have to allow it. If it still fails, email [email protected] with the address and we will look.

In ABDA Community, our own forum. Ask in Help, report problems in Bug reports and vote on ideas in Feature requests. New releases are announced there too. For anything private, such as a question about your data, email [email protected].

Yes. The app follows your device's light or dark setting and uses each forum's own logo and colour scheme, including their dark variants when they provide them. The interface is translated into eleven languages.

Drafts do, because Discourse stores them on the server rather than on your device — start a reply on your phone and finish it on the web. Read state and notifications are the forum's own, so they stay in step too.