README

Shows the avatars of everyone who has posted in a discussion, right in the discussion list, so people can see who is in a thread before they open it. Anyone the strip has no room for is counted on a badge that opens the full, paginated participant list.

Built for Flarum 2.

composer require ernestdefoe/discussion-participants

Existing forums need a one-time backfill — discussions that predate the extension have no participant data until it is built:

php flarum participants:populate

There is a Recalculate button on the extension's settings page that does the same job in the browser, for anyone without shell access.

What it does

An avatar strip on every discussion row, on its own line under the title by default — or inline beside the reply count, if you would rather rows stayed one line tall.

An overflow badge counting the participants the strip has no room for. Clicking it opens the full roster, ten per page, with each person's post count in that discussion and a link to their profile.

Profile cards on hover — the same card Flarum shows on post authors, on the same timing.

It follows the reader's theme, light or dark, and mirrors correctly under right-to-left languages.

And it stays honest as the discussion moves:

Live. A first-time replier's avatar appears without a refresh, and the counts move with it.
Moderation-aware. Hiding, restoring and deleting a post all update the strip and the counts.

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
Where to show them	Under the title	Under the title on its own line, or inline beside the reply count.
Avatars shown	6	How many avatars before the rest become an overflow badge. Up to 12.
Avatar size	Medium	Small (20px), medium (24px) or large (32px).
Order	Who posted first	Who posted first, who posted most, or who posted most recently.
The person who started the discussion	Never show them	Their avatar is already in the author column, so the strip leaves them out. Can also show them only if they replied as well, or always show them first.
Minimum participants	1	Discussions with fewer repliers get no strip, which keeps quiet lists clean.
Show the overflow badge	On
Show a profile card on hover	On
Limit to tags	All tags	Needs `flarum/tags`. Hidden entirely without it.

Notes on how it works

It does not touch discussions.participants_count. That column belongs to Flarum core. This extension keeps its own discussion_participants table and a small discussion_participant_meta table, and drops only those two on uninstall.

The discussion list stays at a fixed query count. Participants are a real Eloquent relation, eager loaded across the whole page with a per-discussion limit, so a page of twenty discussions costs two extra queries rather than twenty. Serving them as genuine users resources also means the same person appearing in ten discussions is sent once, and core's own avatar and profile card components render them untouched.

The overflow badge counts repliers, not participants. Whoever started the discussion already has their avatar on the row in core's author column, so counting them as hidden would overstate the badge by one on nearly every discussion.

Compatibility

Flarum ^2.0
PHP ^8.3
MySQL 8.0+ / MariaDB 10.6+ (the per-discussion limit uses a window function)
Optional: flarum/tags for the tag filter

Licence

MIT

ernestdefoe / discussion-participants

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