Community discussion forum software

Orgo carries four kinds of group, and an organization can run all four at once:

• General, which every member joins automatically, commonly used as a top-down announcements channel
• Open-to-join, surfaced as a suggestion on the member dashboard, with an optional joining form
• Private, invite-only, and invisible to anyone outside it
• Role-based, auto-populated from a role such as every chapter president, and kept in sync as roles change

A board of directors or an ethics committee gets a group that non-members cannot see or search. Minutes, bylaws, and papers posted there stay inside it, while more general documents go to a group the whole membership can read.

Each group organizes its own discussions into categories and topics, which is what turns a feed into a forum. Members switch between the standard view and a compact list view, and the platform remembers each member's choice.

Groups sit above local chapters, so every chapter in a region shares one space, and interest-based groups cut across the whole network. Cross-chapter visibility is a setting: chapters either see each other's posts or stay fully encapsulated.

A group carries its own discussions, events, files drive, member list, and optional projects. Each module can be switched off per group, so an announcements channel stays a single stream instead of a workspace nobody asked for.

A single post supports:

• Rich text
• Photos and media galleries
• Videos
• File attachments
• Embedded YouTube links

Members react to a post with emoji, and the reaction list shows who reacted rather than only a count. Comments run underneath the post, and an author or moderator can disable comments on an individual post when a thread should stay read-only.

Typing @ and a member's name pulls that person into the thread and sends them a notification, which is how a question reaches the one person who can answer it without a separate email.

Members subscribe to or unsubscribe from a single discussion independently of their group membership. Following one active thread does not mean following everything the group posts.

One search field covers members, discussions, events, and files, so an answer posted two years ago surfaces alongside the person who wrote it and the file they attached.

Posting rights are a per-group setting. The general group can be locked to admins only, which turns it into an announcements channel nobody replies to, while an interest group next to it stays open to every member.

Three filters run before a moderator gets involved:

• A built-in profanity dictionary
• A custom blocked-word list your organization maintains
• AI analysis that identifies violence, racism, and profanity

Flagged content goes into a pending-approval queue instead of publishing, and a moderator approves or rejects it. AI analysis can also be switched on for every post rather than only suspected ones, which carries a per-post processing cost.

Any member reports a post or a comment for review. Reports reach the moderators responsible for that group rather than a general inbox, so the people who know the context handle it.

Moderator sits in the permission catalog alongside admin, HR, financial manager, communication manager, and event manager. Each role exists at organization, region, and chapter level, so a chapter moderator handles that chapter's discussions and sees nothing else.

Your organization defines the fields that describe an entry, and those fields become the filters members search with. The same discussion engine then behaves like a structured database rather than a timeline.

Romanian Scouts built a library of activities on top of a discussion namespace. A leader looking for an icebreaker filters by duration, location, indoor or outdoor, group size, age level, and educational objective, and reaches an activity in one query.

Entries are member-generated. Anyone with posting rights in the group contributes one, attaches images, videos, and files, tags it so it appears under the right filters, and mentions colleagues. The same moderation tools apply.

Practice that would otherwise stay inside one chapter becomes searchable by the whole organization. This is the difference between a national body knowing that good material exists somewhere and being able to find it.

The dashboard aggregates posts, upcoming events, open votes, and assigned tasks from every group a member belongs to. Nothing is promoted, demoted, or hidden. Members see what their groups posted, in the order it was posted.

Each member sets their own delivery preferences:

• Push notifications on mobile and in the browser
• Email
• Instant, daily digest, or weekly digest
• Set separately for discussions, comments, mentions, events, votes, and tasks

The organization sets the defaults, and members confirm their preferences at first login, which keeps notification sending consent-based.

The Orgo Community app on iOS and Android carries the dashboard feed, discussions, direct messages, and push notifications. A white-label version under your own brand is available as an add-on.

Posts, comments, and reactions each carry a configurable point value, and leaderboards rank most posts and most reactions received. Every gamification element can be switched off independently if ranking members would not suit your culture.

Members hold real-time one-to-one and group chats inside the platform, encrypted and subject to the same content filtering as posts. Direct messages work on the web and in the mobile app, which removes the reason to move a conversation to WhatsApp.

Members connect with each other in the way they would on a professional network, and a suggestion engine proposes connections based on attributes such as age and location.

Members under 18 cannot receive direct messages and are excluded from networking views. Their profiles are visible only inside their own chapter, and browsing minors across the whole organization is restricted to national admins.

A discussion is visible to the members of its group and to the admins responsible for that level. Nothing sits on a public page, and private groups do not appear to members outside them.

Orgo runs on AWS in Frankfurt and member data does not leave the EU. Where an organization needs data held in a specific country, the platform can be deployed to that region.

Orgo does not sell data and does not profile members. Every module exports to CSV at any time, a full REST API covers the platform, and there is no contractual lock-in holding the archive hostage.

There is no archiving step that moves an old discussion out of its group, so a post from ten years ago is found through the same search as a post from this morning. Storage allowances are measured in hundreds of gigabytes, which text discussions barely consume.