I’m part of a team that built a Discourse widget for DAOs, which displays live vote status directly inside forum discussions (quorum progress, countdown timers, results). This allows delegates to immediately see when a proposal is live for voting without switching between the forum and governance platforms, improving participation and reducing friction.
It’s already live with Aave and finishing a Celo integration. We believe Arbitrum could similarly benefit—especially given your active governance community and multi-platform structure.
Who is the right person or working group to speak with about a potential integration? Happy to share more details and a demo.
The main issue we have now is that the forum is hosted by Discourse; so we are unable to install any custom widgets beyond the discourse-approved plugins.
Thanks for the quick response. The widget functions as a Discourse Theme Component rather than a server-side plugin. This is the same method used we use for the Aave DAO forum, which is also hosted by Discourse. We have a one minute installation video that I can send over.
Can just drop it here in the thread for others to see too. Although transparency I am a little reluntant to install custom themes. Would be nice to see what it is like and whether it solves a problem we have here.
It’s a widget that embeds live vote status directly into forum threads (quorum progress, countdowns, results) to solve the issue of delegates sometimes not knowing when voting has started.
For Arbitrium,
Reduces Context Switching: This would help delegates track active votes without constantly switching to Tally/Snapshot, reducing friction and improving participation rates.
Ensures Compliance: Makes it harder to miss voting windows, a critical requirement for RAD rewards.
Stays Decoupled: It doesn’t interfere with the Discourse text editor, user accounts, or server-side logic.
It has been live on Aave for 2 months without a security issue. Happy to share the GitHub for a technical audit if you’d like.
havent been active for a while here.
Just wanted to quickly jump in and share some feedback.
Ive been responsible at the Aave DAO for installing and tweaking this theme component.
We have added many features and David was always super helpful and fast in addressing issues and fixing them.
The DAOs feedback so far has been very positive and I am using it daily since.
Hi, @paulofonseca . I have seen the discussions around your previous proposal and definitely respect the work you’ve done here. It is clearly an issue that needs to be solved.
The reason we’ve focused on this specific Theme Component approach is that it solves for the ‘Hosted Discourse’ constraint that has historically blocked these types of integrations.
Our goal isn’t to replace broader governance tooling, but to provide a complementary, frictionless layer that works directly on the forum.
It’s already helping the Aave ecosystem. We are currently working on Compound and Celo integrations, and we’d love to bring those same improvements to the Arbitrum DAO to help more delegates stay compliant and improve participation.
It shows exactly how we handled the technical constraints of a hosted Discourse setup by using a lightweight UI layer, providing delegates with live voting data (quorum, countdowns, and results) directly where the discussion happens.
our proposal was also implemented using theme components (for the same reason) and its fully open-source. we’ve also had a previous version of it installed on both Aave and Uniswap governance forums some 2 or 3 years ago.
when we’ve put forward this proposal to Arbitrum DAO some 8 or 9 months ago, it was deemed too expensive for the biggest DAO in the world and so it didn’t move forward. i would advise to make sure you can offer this service in a reliable and safe way and therefore you should charge a maintenance fee to the DAO.
Thank you for the advice. I appreciate the insights, @paulofonseca. Yes, it’s been battle-tested on Aave. We worked with their admin to get it to this point. You’re 100% right on the maintenance—it’s the only way to ensure the tool stays reliable as the forum and APIs evolve.
@stonecoldpat, to confirm: the $2,990 is an all-in flat fee for the first year. This covers:
Full Deployment: Desktop + Mobile optimization for the Arbitrum forum.
12-Month Maintenance: Active monitoring for Discourse upgrades and Tally/Snapshot API changes.
Support: A direct line for any bug fixes or patches.
It’s ready for a 5-minute install. We are available today to handle the setup and hand over the documentation. Would you like to proceed with the installation?
