Features
Everything a community needs, and nothing you have to host
Champ is one product at one price. There is no tier where moderation lives, and no add-on for the API. Here is the whole of it.
The forum itself
Forums and categories
Group forums under category headings, reorder them, and give each one its own description and permissions.
Topics and threaded replies
Pin, lock, move, hide or delete topics. Choose whether new topics sort by activity or creation date.
Polls
Attach a multiple-choice poll to any topic and let members vote once.
Reactions and upvotes
Emoji reactions on posts, plus optional upvoting on posts and topics.
Tags
Free-form or a fixed vocabulary you define. Browse any tag as its own page.
Search
Full-text search across topics and posts, switched on per store.
Latest and Unread
Two cross-forum views, so returning members land on what changed since their last visit.
Rich text or Markdown
A rich text editor for members who want one, Markdown for members who prefer it.
Members
Shopify customer sign-in
Members are your Shopify customers. No second account, no second password, no extra sign-up form.
Nicknames and profiles
Optional nicknames, descriptions, signatures and profile view counts — each one switchable.
Avatars
Generated letter avatars, Gravatar, or member-uploaded images.
Private messaging
Member-to-member direct messages in a docked chat widget.
@mentions
Mention another member and they get notified by email.
Members-only forums
Tag individual customers and restrict forums to them — VIPs, wholesale, course members, beta groups.
Online now
Show who is reading the forum right now.
Anonymous posting
Allow posts without an account, or require sign-in for everything including read access.
Moderation and safety
Moderators
Promote members to moderator. They get moderation powers on the storefront itself, not in your admin.
Approval queue
Hold new posts for review before they appear, per forum.
Layered spam defences
A blocklist, cross-store IP reputation, content heuristics, a honeypot field and rate limits, checked cheapest-first.
reCAPTCHA and Akismet
Bring your own keys for either or both.
Post throttles
A minimum interval between posts, plus burst and sustained limits per address.
Audit log
Who changed what, and when.
Password protection
Put the entire forum behind a shared password while you set it up.
Design and presentation
Your theme, your domain
Rendered through Shopify’s App Proxy, inside your own theme layout, at a path you choose.
Colour and type controls
Header, background, headings, body text, links and category headings, plus a body font.
Logo and favicon
Your own logo at the height you specify.
Custom CSS
Write your own, validated before it saves so a typo can never take the stylesheet down.
Custom menus
Add your own links to the forum header.
Translated strings
Every piece of forum copy is editable — translate it, or just reword it.
Meta and Open Graph
Meta descriptions and link-preview titles for the forum and its topics.
Sitemap
A forum sitemap, so search engines find every topic.
Email and notifications
Topic and forum subscriptions
Members follow what they care about and get notified when it moves.
Unread alerts
An optional prompt drawing members back to what they have not read.
Moderator notifications
Get emailed when something needs your attention.
Send from your own domain
Point Champ at your own SMTP server so forum mail comes from you, not from us.
Editable templates
Notification and mention emails use templates you can rewrite.
Growth and data
Points and badges
Award points for posting, starting topics, receiving upvotes, and completing a profile.
Leaderboard
A public ranking page, with the username format and avatars under your control.
Webhooks
Fire a Liquid-templated HTTP request whenever a topic or post is created — into Slack, a CRM, anywhere.
JSON API
Read and write forums, topics, posts and users with a scoped API secret.
Full data export
Request a JSON export of forums, topics, posts and users, with cross-reference IDs intact.
Image uploads
Connect your own Cloudinary account for member image and PDF attachments.
In practice
A topic, as your members see it
Avatars, points badges, moderator flags, reactions, upvotes and a reply box — all inside your theme, at your URL, signed in with your customer accounts.