DLE Forum

DLE Forum is a full-featured forum and community space right inside your DataLife Engine 15.1–21.0 website. Boards and topics, quick chat between members, notifications, reactions, reputation, trust levels and badges, pre-moderation, reports and moderator tools. Users, groups, profile and template are the same as your site's: no second registration. The forum works with any template and needs no changes to .htaccess, nginx or rules.json.

See it live: demo forum — chat, add reactions and take a look at the admin panel.

A great fit for product support, niche communities, discussing your site's content, Q&A, private members-only clubs, or simply lively conversation between members.

Highlights

• A community that keeps visitors coming back. People don't just read a news story and leave: they ask a question, get an answer and return. Every topic is a new page of fresh, real content, and your audience stays on your site instead of a social network.
• Forum and site as one. One login, one DLE profile, one design. The forum sits inside your template and picks up its colors, and can even become your site's home page if you like.
• Quick chat, Facebook-style. A chat window on top of any page, messages without reloading, sound, emoji, "Read" receipts. Floating chat, an icon in the header, or just a messages page — one setting.
• Moderation without opening the admin panel. Pre-moderation by group, reports, time-limited restrictions, moving, merging and splitting topics, bulk actions — moderators do it all right on the site.
• Members grow with the forum. Reactions earn reputation, reputation unlocks trust levels, and badges are awarded for achievements automatically. Repeated reactions can't be used to inflate reputation.
• Fast at 100,000 posts and search-ready. Forum home page: 33.7 requests per second; search: 27.6. Short URLs, canonical, DiscussionForumPosting markup for Google, honest unique view counts.

Forum structure, topics and posts

• Categories → boards → sub-boards → topics, breadcrumbs on every page; the number of topics and posts per page is set in the settings.
• Pinned, closed and solved topics stand out in the list at a glance. A board can be made announcements-only — no new topics from users.
• The DLE editor with quotes, @username mentions, images and attachments. Reactions, quotes and subscriptions work without reloading the page.
• "Best Answer" and "Solved" — a support or Q&A forum out of the box: the solution is highlighted and its author is credited with a best answer.
• Editing and deleting your own posts — within a time window you set. Deletion is soft: a note remains in place of the post, and an administrator can restore it.
• Unread markers: new topics and replies are visible right away, one button takes you to the first new post, and "Mark all as read" is a single click.
• Unique views: reloading the page doesn't inflate the counter.

One profile — the DLE profile

The forum has no separate profile of its own: everything about a user is shown in their DLE profile.

• Forum card in the profile: topics, posts, best answers, reputation, trust level, badges, social links and latest topics. It appears automatically; to place it your own way, use the {profile-forum-…} tags in userinfo.tpl.
• Forum fields — occupation, website, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, GitHub, LinkedIn, birth year — are edited in the regular DLE profile form and saved with its button.
• Privacy: users can stop others from messaging them in chat and choose whether to get an email when someone quotes them.
• A "Message" button in the profile and in the post author card opens a conversation in chat.
• Activity pages: all of a user's topics, posts and badges on the forum.

Quick chat between members

The forum's own messaging, as fast as a messenger, separate from DLE private messages.

• Three display modes: floating chat on every page of the site; an icon in the header with a counter and a list of recent conversations; or a messages page only — in which case the chat loads no CSS or JS on any other page.
• Just like a messenger: conversation list and chat side by side, messages arrive without reloading, Enter to send, emoji, "Sent" and "Read" statuses.
• Never miss a message: sound, a pop-up with the sender's name, a counter on the chat button, in the site header and in the browser tab title.
• Easy on the server: with several tabs open, only one polls; in the background the interval grows; a "nothing new" response weighs 81 bytes.
• Under control: who can message is set by group, flood control, a limit on new conversations per hour, and the DLE ignore list is respected. A moderator can block chat for a specific user for a set period.

Notifications and subscriptions

• Notification center at /forum/notifications/ with a counter; all notifications can be marked as read in one click.
• Subscriptions to topics and to entire boards.
• What it notifies about: replies in subscribed topics, new topics in boards, mentions, quotes, new badges, report outcomes, post approval and rejection; for staff — new content awaiting pre-moderation.
• Emails are sent through DLE's mail settings via a queue, in small batches with retries — no cron and no delay for the person posting the reply.
• Email texts for every event are editable in the admin panel, with variables and reset to the default text.

Attachments and images

• Drag-and-drop upload or file picker, without reloading the page, with previews.
• Image viewer: images open full screen right in the topic.
• Per-group permissions: images and files separately, allowed extensions, size, number of files per post, minimum reputation.
• Board trust level for uploading and, separately, for downloading — files can be restricted to experienced members.
• Tidy disk: unfinished uploads are removed automatically after a set time, and orphaned files are cleaned up with a tool in the admin panel.

Reactions, reputation, trust levels and badges

• Reactions: 7 built-in ("Like", "Love", "Thanks", "Useful", "Agree", "Funny", "Dislike") plus as many of your own as you want — with an icon, color, points and the groups allowed to use them. One reaction per person per post: choosing another replaces the previous one.
• Reputation is the sum of points from reactions received, shown in the author card and profile.
• Trust levels from "Newbie" to "Legend" — with your own names, colors, icons and thresholds. Levels unlock viewing a board, new topics, replies, file uploads and downloads.
• Badges, manual and automatic: first topic, first reply, number of posts or topics, reactions received, reputation, best answers, Trusted, Expert and Legend levels. Retroactive awarding — with one button.
• Group styles: each DLE group gets its own badge, color and background in the author card — admins and moderators are easy to spot.

Moderation, reports and restrictions

Moderators work on the site itself. A moderator can be assigned to the whole forum or to a single board.

• Pre-moderation of topics and replies — separately and by group. The author sees that the post is under review; approve or reject with a reason — right in the topic or from the queue.
• Close, pin, move, merge, split. When merging, posts are ordered by date, attachments, reactions and subscriptions move along with them, and the old URL returns a 301.
• Bulk actions in a board: close, open, pin, move, approve or delete dozens of topics at once.
• Reports on topics and posts: reason (spam, abuse, off-topic, illegal, duplicate, other), statuses, moderator note, and a notification to the reporter about the outcome. Report frequency is rate-limited.
• User restrictions for 1, 7 or 30 days or permanently: the whole forum, new topics, replies, file uploads, reactions, reports, chat. The DLE account is left untouched, the user sees the reason and duration, and restrictions can be lifted early.
• Log: who did what and when, from which IP, old and new values. Recent actions are shown on the admin dashboard.
• Anti-spam: a delay between posts, upload limits, links and attachments only after a set number of posts.

Access permissions

• Permission matrix by board and group: viewing, topics, replies, editing and deleting own posts, uploads, reactions, reports, moderation.
• Private categories, boards and topics for selected groups — hidden completely or shown with a label like "Members only".
• Default permissions for all boards, and custom ones for an individual board.
• Exempt groups that bypass trust levels, flood control and limits.
• Guests: allow or deny them viewing the forum and searching.

Forum search

• Full-text search across topics and posts with highlighted matches.
• Filters: board, author, period (day, week, month, year), pinned, closed and solved topics.
• For guests, search is turned on or off with a single setting.

SEO and URLs

• Short URLs like /forum/topic/12-how-to-install/; the forum prefix can be changed to anything you like. It also works with DLE friendly URLs turned off — via index.php?do=forum.
• Forum as the site's home page with one checkbox: / opens the forum, /forum/ redirects there with a 301, and DLE news, categories and profiles work as before.
• Title, description, canonical on every page, "Page N" on pages 2+, Open Graph, and a custom SEO title and description for each board.
• Schema.org DiscussionForumPosting — the markup Google uses for forums: author, dates, replies, views.
• Clean indexing: search, forms, notifications and chat are closed to crawlers; nonexistent pages return 404, restricted ones return 403.

Template and appearance

• Any site template: the forum is output in {content} of your main.tpl; the header, menu and footer stay yours.
• DLE 21.0 templates (Air, Chronicle, Hub): the forum picks up the template's accent color, corner radius and shadows, and the site's dark theme switches the forum, the editor and the chat too.
• "Appearance" screen: forum colors, corner radius, spacing and fonts are changed without editing CSS; your values are kept when the module is updated, and reset is one button.
• Custom templates: copy the .tpl you need into templates/<template>/forum/ — the forum will use your copy.
• Tags for main.tpl: {forum-link}, {forum-messages-badge}, {forum-profile-notify}, {forum-profile-messages}, {forum-unread-total}, blocks [forum-logged]…[/forum-logged], [forum-has-notifications]…[/forum-has-notifications] and more. A "Forum" menu item with a counter takes one line.
• Mobile: topics, replies, chat and moderation are comfortable at 375 px wide.

DLE-style admin panel

Admin sections are grouped by purpose:

• Overview: Dashboard with counters, latest topics, reports and moderator actions; Settings in tabs with search; URL and SEO rules; Appearance; Template tags.
• Structure: Categories, Boards, Permissions defaults, Trust Levels.
• Content: Topics, Posts (with restore of deleted posts), Moderation Queue, Reports.
• Users & Community: User Restrictions, Badges, Reactions, Group Styles.
• Communication: Email Templates.
• Maintenance: Database health — check and repair tables with one button; Tools — recount counters and badges, cleanup; Logs.
• Interface in Russian, English, Ukrainian and Spanish.

Speed on large forums

Tested on a forum with 100,000 posts and 5,000 topics:

• forum home page — 33.7 requests per second;
• search — 27.6 requests per second on a full-text index;
• a reply in a topic with 50 subscribers — 25 database queries, emails go to the queue;
• 200 simultaneous replies, reactions and new topics — accurate counters, no errors;
• site pages outside the forum — zero forum queries, as fast as without the module.

Security

• Attachments, including images, are served only after checking access to the board and topic and the trust level.
• Dangerous extensions (php, phtml, svg, html, exe and the like) can't be allowed, and file content is checked against its type.
• Hidden stays hidden: private boards, attachments and hidden text aren't visible to those who shouldn't see them.
• The forum has been tested against CSRF, SQL injection, XSS, tampering with other users' objects and file upload bypasses.

Use cases

• Product support: questions, "Best Answer" and "Solved", notifications to the author.
• Niche community: boards by interest, reputation, badges, chat.
• Discussing your site's content: the forum next to your news, one login and one profile.
• Private club: boards for selected groups or trust levels.
• Forum-first site: the forum on the home page, news in the background.

Summary

DLE Forum gives your DataLife Engine site a full-fledged community without a second engine: topics and replies, quick chat, notifications, reputation and trust levels, on-site moderation, and a forum that looks like part of your template and stays fast even at 100,000 posts.