With our latest release, we’ve supercharged “post” rooms into full-fledged “forum” rooms — and changed the name of the room type to match. In this quick post, we’ll share a little bit of background on why we built forum rooms, what's live now, and what you can expect to see next.

Our goal with Geneva has always been to build the world’s best group communication app — something that gives friends, clubs, and communities everything they need to interact, all in one place. Sometimes you want to talk live with your people in chat rooms or with voice or video, but there are many other times when you want to be able to share ‘asynchronously’ in a more organized way. While Geneva’s initial “post” room style, with its more formal structure, sorting, and filtering, was a good start, we always believed it could be better.

So in this major overhaul, we’re turning post rooms into even more powerful forum rooms — making it easier than ever to share longer-form content and facilitate deeper collaboration right within your home on Geneva.

Okay, so what's new?

Text formatting

With this update, you can now format posts using several different text sizes and bulleted or numbered lists, as well as make text bold, underlined, and more. Over time, you'll see us push what's possible here even further.

List view

In Geneva’s initial post rooms, posts with images, polls, or a ton of text would take up a significant amount of space, making it difficult to scan through all the posts in the room. In forum rooms, each person can now choose to look at a room in either the traditional expanded “Display” view or the new, more condensed “List” view.

Sort by most recently updated

This one’s pretty straightforward but super useful: you can now sort posts in a forum room not just by most recently posted or most commented on, but also based on which posts have been most recently commented on. This is great for finding hot conversations and resurfacing old questions that may have more up to date answers.

Pin to top

Have a specific post that you want to be easily accessible or get more attention that others? Now you can “pin” a post to the top a post room and it’ll always show up for everyone at the top of the list. This is in addition to our existing 'pins' functionality and is especially useful for things like "how to use this room" overview posts or posts that contain timeless info and links to important resources.

Post drafts

We know that sometimes posts take a little longer to craft. So now, if you need stop mid-way through writing a post, you can save it and pick back up right where you left off later. To start, you can have one draft at a time per room, but we’re planning to eventually support having multiple drafts.

Hide link previews

Here’s another area where you'll now have more flexibility to make your post look exactly how you want it to: if a link preview isn’t relevant or is just taking up too much space, you can simply remove it from the post editor with just a tap or a click.

Choose default reaction

Many of you told us that having both upvotes and emoji reactions was confusing, so we’ve simplified things here. Instead, in each post room, you'll be able to set a default emoji for people to react to posts with. Everyone can still of course add additional emoji reactions too!

How should I use forum rooms?

The possibilities are endless! If you've already been using 'post' rooms, the transition will be seamless, but if not, here are 5 ways to use forum rooms that might make your community more fun, organized and valuable your members.

What's next?

You tell us! We’re excited to hear about all the different ways you're using forum rooms with your groups and communities, and how it’s going. If you have specific ideas or suggestions for how we can make them even better, email us at [email protected] 🌼