May 13
Forum
Problem: The Print Trade has a growing community of photographers trading zines and prints, but conversation lives nowhere — questions about editions, paper stocks, shipping, and trade etiquette get scattered across DMs and one-off threads. Without a persistent, searchable space, knowledge evaporates and newcomers can't catch up on how the community actually works.
Proposed changes:
- Stand up Flarum at forum.theprinttrade.com as the community discussion layer, separate from the trading flow on the main site
- Host on a small VPS with MariaDB and Caddy fronting PHP-FPM — Cloudflare in front for DNS, caching, and TLS
- Seed the initial taxonomy with a small set of tags (Introductions, Trades & Swaps, Print & Paper Talk, Zines, Site Feedback) rather than over-structuring on day one
- Lock down moderation defaults: email confirmation required, no guest posting, rate-limited new accounts, basic spam filters on
- Brand-match the Flarum theme to The Print Trade's look (typography, neutral palette, no emoji decoration) so it reads as part of the same project
- Skip native Flarum signup for now and gate registration to admin-invite only while the SSO/OIDC integration is being built — avoids creating throwaway forum-only accounts that we'd later have to reconcile against the main site's identity
- Leave a clean seam for the follow-up: once the main site is an OIDC provider, the forum can switch to SSO without migrating user data, because no public signups will have happened yet
In Progress