README

A dark-first community theme for Flarum 2, shaped like Discord and Circle. Tags become #channels in a left sidebar, discussions read as chat-style rows, and the people who are here right now are listed on the right.

What it does

A sidebar on every page. It holds the forum name and member count, search, Activity, and Messages with an unread badge (flarum/messages). Below those are your tags as #channels, then an Explore group with every link other extensions add. The bottom panel shows who you are, your online status, and the header's own controls: notifications, messages, theme switchers and the session menu.
Channels grouped the way your tags already are. A primary tag with children becomes a group headed by its name. Primary tags without children share a Channels group. The most active secondary tags appear under Tags. The order is flarum/tags' own ordering.
Unread dots and mention badges. A channel shows a dot when something was posted since your last visit (or since you last opened it). It shows a red count when it holds your unread mentions.
Each channel has a header with its #name and description, the sort menu, Following, mark-all-read and New discussion.
Chat-style rows: avatar, author, time, a Pinned chip (flarum/sticky), the title, a one-line excerpt, and on the right the reply count and last activity.
"New since your last visit": a divider above the first discussion that moved while you were away.
"Start a discussion in #channel": a bar at the foot of the list that opens the composer with the channel's tag already filled in.
An Online list. Staff come first, then members, each with a presence dot. With ernestdefoe/presence installed, each person also shows what they are doing ("Browsing #General"). The list is also offered as a widget for Bespoke and FoF Forum Widgets.
Phones get their own layout: a top bar, a row of channel chips, a floating compose button and a tab bar (Home, Messages, Alerts, You). The sidebar becomes a drawer.
A real light theme for forums set to light or auto, not the dark one with the lights left on.

Discussions read as a conversation

A header bar with #channel › title, the reply count and a stack of participants, plus Solved (fof/best-answer), Jump to unread, Follow and the controls.
Messages, not cards. Consecutive messages from one person within seven minutes share a single header, with the time in the gutter on hover. Day dividers and a red "New messages" line mark where you left off.
"↳ replying to @name: …" above a message that opens with a mention of another post. It's built from the mention data already on the page.
A toolbar on hover or focus carries core's own actions (react, reply, quote, ⋯), so likes, reactions and every other extension's actions still work. On touch screens, a tap brings it up.
Events (renamed, tagged, pinned) are one grey line. A Page Builder article or a blog post keeps its first post as the article.
"Message #channel › title" is docked at the foot and opens Flarum's own composer. When you can't reply, it says why.
Thread info replaces the scrubber: who started the thread and when, replies, tags, jump to First / Unread / Latest, and the participants with presence dots.
Live replies (flarum/realtime, your own replies, "load more") are decorated exactly like the rest.

A channel	Light

A discussion, light	The sidebar: unread dots and a mention badge	The Online list

On phones

Real devices: Mobile Safari on an iPhone 17 Pro simulator, and Chrome on a Pixel 9 emulator.

Android: channels	Android: a discussion	Android: replying, keyboard up	The channel drawer

iPhone: channels	iPhone: a discussion	iPhone: light, as a guest	Safari's bars collapsed	Thread info

Settings

Admin → Lobby

Accent colour: Amber, Blue, Green, Pink, or the forum's own primary colour. The presets are tuned to read on both of Lobby's backgrounds.
Show the Online list, and how many people it lists (5–100).
Staff groups: whose members are listed first, under Staff.
Permission: See who is online (guests by default).

Privacy

The Online list follows core's own "Allow others to see when I am online" preference. Members who turn it off are never listed. Staff who can see last-seen times see them marked Invisible, as core does.
"Since your last visit" and channel read state are kept in the reader's own browser. Lobby stores nothing about visits on the server.
Geist and Geist Mono are self-hosted (SIL OFL 1.1) and served with the forum's own assets, so no page makes a request to a font CDN.

Cost

Measured with 25 tags (15 of them children) and 60 discussions. These numbers are enforced by the test suite.

	Queries
A discussion's posts	none: Lobby adds no query and no request per post
Discussion list, 1 row or 50	+1 for the whole page (the excerpt's first-post eager load); flat with the row count
Forum payload	+2 for a guest (child tags and their parents), +3 for a member (plus mentions, as one grouped query); flat with the number of channels
Online list	1 for a guest when warm; who is online is one query cached for a minute and shared by every viewer

Every page	Size
forum.js	32.2 KB minified, 9.7 KB gzipped
Lobby's CSS	38.6 KB minified, 7.2 KB gzipped
Geist (latin)	29 KB, preloaded; latin-ext and the mono face load only when a page uses them

Running it next to other themes

Lobby works with Wardrobe. Tick it as a theme there, and members (and guests) can choose it while everyone else keeps the forum's default. Wardrobe keeps every other theme's CSS and JavaScript out of a Lobby visitor's page, and Lobby keeps its server-side work (channel list, counts, excerpts, the font preload) to the visitors who are actually on Lobby. Visitors on another theme pay nothing for it.

Install

composer require ernestdefoe/lobby

Then enable Lobby under Admin → Extensions. To update later:

composer update ernestdefoe/lobby
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Licence

MIT. Free to use. The bundled Geist fonts are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (assets/fonts/OFL.txt).

☕ If you like the things I have built, consider buying me a coffee.

ernestdefoe / lobby

Package info

Security

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