Community · App Starter
Community Template
A working community platform — threaded forums, voting, moderation — generated into a codebase you own.
Describe the community you're building, and Dual7 generates this platform around it: organized forums, threaded conversations with voting, member profiles, and the moderation tooling that keeps it healthy. It ships as a full-stack app you own — your members, your rules, your database.
- 6 core entities
- Moderation built in
- Code you own
- Vibe + Governed modes
01 · Data model
What's inside: the data model
A community platform is conversations plus governance. This starter generates six connected entities — the threads your members read, the votes that surface the good ones, and the flags that let moderators act before problems compound.
| table | what it holds |
|---|---|
forums | The top-level rooms — announcements, help, show-and-tell — each with visibility and posting rules. |
topics | Threads started by members within a forum, with title, status, and pinning for what matters. |
replies | Threaded responses within topics, editable with history, so conversations keep their shape at depth. |
votes | Up and down signals on topics and replies — the ranking raw material for hot, top, and rising views. |
moderation_flags | Member reports and automated holds, queued with reason, reporter, and resolution for review. |
profiles | Public member identity — display name, bio, avatar, and contribution history across the community. |
02 · Screens
Signature modules
Threaded discussions
01Topics hold genuinely threaded replies, so a forty-comment conversation stays readable instead of collapsing into a flat scroll. Quoting, editing with history, and pinned topics come standard — the texture regulars expect from a real forum.
Voting and ranking
02Votes feed hot, top, and new orderings per forum, so the best answers rise without a moderator hand-placing them. The ranking logic is readable code in your project — when your community needs recency weighted differently, you change a function, not a plan tier.
Moderation queue
03Flagged content lands in one queue with the reason, reporter, and full context, and moderators resolve with remove, warn, or dismiss — every action logged. Rate limits and new-member holds are policies in your code, tunable to your community's actual failure modes.
Member profiles
04Each member gets a public profile with bio and contribution history — the topics, replies, and reputation that make a username a neighbor. Profile fields are yours to extend, from portfolio links to expertise tags.
03 · Process
How it works
- 1You
Describe your community
Tell Dual7 who gathers and around what — a product's users, a craft, a cohort. Note what makes yours different: private areas, expert verification, strict or loose moderation.
- 2Vibe mode
Generate and tune in Vibe mode
Get the working platform in minutes, then shape it conversationally: add a forum, change the ranking weights, require approval for first posts. Every adjustment is real code you can read.
- 3Governed mode
Launch through the governed pipeline
When members show up, ship through Dual7's approval gates to your infrastructure — member data in your database, an audit trail behind every change.
04 · Fit
Who the Community starter is for
Companies moving off the group-chat treadmill
Chat is where community knowledge goes to scroll away. A forum makes the tenth ask of the same question findable by search instead of answerable again — and when it's your codebase, the archive compounds on infrastructure you control.
Product teams hosting their user community
A user community on a rented platform is a churn risk stacked on a data gap. Generate your own and the threads live next to your product — same auth, your analytics, and integrations against your own schema instead of a platform's API quota.
Founders building community-first businesses
When the community is the product, the platform's limits are your product's limits. Owning the code means the weird thing your community does — rituals, challenges, seasonal events — can be a first-class feature instead of a pinned-post workaround.
Organizations that can't outsource member data
Professional associations, patient groups, internal networks — some member lists shouldn't live in a third party's growth funnel. An owned platform keeps identity, activity, and private conversations in a database you govern.
05 · Yours
Customize it, own it
Make it yours
The generated platform is a foundation with the boring parts finished. Rename forums to spaces, guilds, or channels and the interface follows. In Vibe mode, add fields and rules conversationally — expertise tags on profiles, a solved marker for help topics, image posting rules per forum — and watch them land as reviewable code.
Deeper changes are ordinary engineering on your own codebase: private forums gated by role or subscription, a digest email assembled from the week's top threads, single sign-on from your product, or a reputation system tuned to what your community values. There's no runtime dependency on Dual7 — the platform is yours to evolve for as long as the community lasts.
Why a starter, not a subscription
Hosted community platforms hold your members and charge you rising rent for the privilege — per-member pricing, locked exports, features gated by tier. This starter generates the whole platform as source code in your repository: threads, votes, profiles, and moderation running on your infrastructure, with the member graph in your database. The community's home can't be repriced out from under it.
The trade is stewardship: you operate the platform your members trust. Dual7's governed pipeline keeps that trust operational — approval gates so changes don't break a live community, an audit trail of what shipped, and regeneration when the platform needs to grow a new wing rather than a patch.
06 · Industries
Industry versions
Creator Community
Your audience in your building — tiered access, member spaces, and live sessions in code you own.
Developer Community
A technical forum that respects code — Q&A with accepted answers, syntax-aware posts, earned reputation — in a codebase you own.
Cohort Community
Discussion that follows the syllabus — per-cohort spaces, weekly prompts, instructor presence — in code your program owns.
Community template — frequently asked questions
What do I get when I start from this community template?
A working full-stack community platform in a codebase you own: forums, threaded topics and replies, voting with ranked views, member profiles, and a moderation queue with logged actions. It deploys to your own infrastructure with all member data in your database.
How does moderation actually work?
Members flag content, automated rules can hold suspect posts, and everything lands in one queue with context. Moderators resolve with logged actions, and the policies themselves — rate limits, new-member restrictions, banned-term rules — are readable code you can tune to your community.
Can members sign in with my product's existing accounts?
Yes — the platform is a normal full-stack app, so wiring single sign-on from your product or identity provider is standard integration work in code you own. One login, and community activity can flow into the same analytics as product activity.
Does it scale as the community grows?
The generated app uses a conventional relational schema and stateless web tier, so it scales the way your other applications do — and since per-member pricing doesn't exist here, growth changes your hosting bill, not your license math.
Can I migrate an existing community into it?
The schema is plain tables — forums, topics, replies, members — so exports from most forum platforms map over with an import script. Because you own the target schema, the awkward parts of a migration are fixable in your code rather than dependent on an importer's opinions.
Related
Dual7 App Starters
Build your Community on your terms
A working community platform — threaded forums, voting, moderation — generated into a codebase you own. Describe your version to start — the output is a project you own.