Is there a theme, or plugin, to use Ghost as a forum?
After all, a “blog post” with comments is basically a forum thread, so theoretically it is possible to theme a blog post to look more like a forum, and maybe plugins can add more features that forums might have.
WordPress has plugins that enable forums on WP sites:
So I have questions:
- Are there any such uses of Ghost?
- Have you thought of doing this for Ghost’s own forums, as a way to dogfood and show off Ghost?
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After all, a “blog post” with comments is basically a forum thread,
IMO that’s extremely reductionist - generally forums allow anyone to create threads, while blog posts (especially within Ghost, where “staff” and “members” are completely segregated) can only be created by a trusted set of contributors. Not to mention the huge number of differences in administration of a publication platform vs discussion platform.
That being said, from a theme perspective, the actual comments on a post aren’t easily accessible from themes due to the current architecture (comments are asynchronously loaded using a mini-app called comments-ui), so I don’t know of (m)any off-the-shelf themes that have support for it.
Speaking from a moderator’s perspective, I hope not 
Ghost’s forum is pretty big (56k topics, 14k members), and Discourse’s built-in moderation tools really help keep the forum clean.
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Ghost doesn’t have a built-in forum feature, but with the right theme and customizations, you could get close. Have you checked if any developers have created plugins or workarounds for this?