Hello IC devs,
Much like the philosophy of the Internet Computer itself, we’ve just been building on the IC Forums, pushing out update after update to fix up the cosmetics, the backend functionality, and at this point I can say that the IC Forums is no longer reliant on its aged infrastructure from Caffeine, and it’s its own platform, as it’s been partially all year. I’m only going to go over the bigger updates, and you can find the rest of the information in the proper channel.
Update 8.1.2026 brought forth an embedded wallet system for both users and communities. These wallets are built to house real ICP tokens for platform and community subscriptions. With this, users can support the platform with three paid tiers, and these tiers will allow the user to access special features as the functionality is fully put in.
On the backend, those funds are converted as needed using ICPSwap @ICPSwap, and sent over to the CycleOps canister @icme once per month. Supported currencies include ICP, ckBTC, ckETH, and ckUSDC, with support for any ICRC token added based on canister ID. For instance, I’m able to receive ICS tokens in my IC forums wallet. The big four are the only ones that can be used for subscriptions across the site.
Speaking of that, individual forums made also have their own wallets, and this can be linked with the newly revamped user group system to create paid groups. These groups operate in both directions: groups can be set as a paid membership to support the community monthly, or groups can be set to receive a steady salary from the forum’s treasury. Paired with the category permission system, you can close off categories from the public, and create private paid forums for exclusive content.
The SEO system was also revamped, and the frontend is now served via the backend along two routes. The human route gets the normal frontend, but the non-human route for bot traffic and social media embeds follow a stripped down version of the forum post or user profile. This should be helpful for your topics to be sent over to large search engines so that people can discover them, as well as sharing posts on other platforms like X.
Update 8.19.2026 added in much needed moderation features. There is now a detailed reporting system, where users can report topics that violate your forum’s rules, and those with the proper permissions can resolve the reports. As a part of that, there is a warning system built to keep track of malicious user infractions, and banning/unbanning members now work for both temporary and permanent bans. Users are notified of the status of the reports that they submit.
All users by default join the IC Forums Official community when they make their account. This is the center of the forums, where users can introduce themselves, check out platform news, tips on growing their communities, and a place to share their forums and find others to join as well.
The forums now support guest permissions, which are special permissions for users that are not members of a community, as well as users that are not logged in at all. For instance, by default all users of the forums can make posts on a newly created subforum. However, the subforum owner can disable that option by turning canPost to off for their categories. This enforces membership requirements before posting, which can be used to mitigate spam.
Update 8.29.2026, released today, tightens up a lot of the UI/UX. A big one is the topic title bars, which now take up less space while still giving all of the needed topic information. The bar now condenses as you scroll down, which frees a ton of space on mobile devices, so that users can focus on the discussion.
All users have been switched over to a username system, which converts all of the principal-based routing to user profiles to human-readable usernames. These usernames are created based on a users display name, and will be editable in the future. So, it turns:
https://icforums.xyz/user/nt37w-soz25-fshol-o3pon-rdyzp-3aa4u-acqty-eiimt-lwzog-6bptl-jqe
to something more like:
https://icforums.xyz/u/icpfun
Soon enough, you’ll be able to send ICP to a username when you’re on the forums, rather than copy/pasting an address. Cosmetics all around were cleaned up. All of the small touches and glitches have been paid attention to.
So, if you’ve been over to the forums lately, you’ll appreciate the user experience. From being able to embed SNS proposals, to sharing your community socials on the header, to fixing up the coding syntax colors with support for over 20 languages, to rebuilding the loading skeletons which show while data is being pulled, to adding your forum’s icon and invitation to join at the bottom of a topic for users that haven’t signed up, the forums are becoming ready for normal, daily use.
And the forums have seen the attention of large ICP players, such as Mingle Berry Media, OhShii Labs, The Swop @StofAxeCap, BonsaiOS, @TokoStudios and more. However the bounce rate remains high. As a result, there’s a monthly community discussion taking place for users to directly talk about how to boost the growth of their communities on ICF, and indirectly, their projects elsewhere.
Perhaps what I think is the better selling point, is that it’s free to create your community. There’s no ICP fee to post like others out there. Like OpenChat, platform revenue comes from users willing to support it directly for extra features.
