README

Hosted AI for Flarum — answers drawn from your own forum, and moderation that reads a post before it flags it. No AI account, no API key, no per-token bill.

Distinct from AI Helper, which stays bring-your-own-key for people who want to run their own model. Steward is sold as capacity through the client area and adds moderation.

What it does

Answers, with sources

A member asks a question and gets an answer assembled from discussions already on your site — with every source cited, so it can be checked rather than trusted.

When nothing on the forum answers the question it says so. It does not reach out to the wider internet, and it does not invent something plausible to fill the gap. An answer you cannot trace back to a real post is worse than no answer.

Retrieval runs against your forum's own search, or — on plans that include it — against a hosted semantic index, so answers are found by meaning rather than keyword overlap.

Members ask at /ask.

Moderation, that never deletes

Every new post is read before it lands. Most are cleared instantly and for nothing; only genuinely ambiguous ones are looked at more closely.

Nothing is ever removed automatically. The strongest outcome is "a person should look at this". Software that reads a post decides what a moderator looks at, never what disappears.
Every non-clear verdict carries reasons in plain words. A queue you cannot read is a queue you cannot trust or tune.
Trusted members are never screened. Spending money to second-guess someone who has posted politely for three years is worse than useless.
CSAM escalates rather than being handled inline.
A moderation outage is not a posting outage. If the service is unreachable, posts publish and are marked unscreened rather than blocked.

Flagged posts land in a review queue on your forum at /moderation/queue, for whoever holds the steward.review permission.

Needs a look: posts Steward could not settle on its own, with its reasons.
Went unchecked: posts published without screening because the allowance ran out or the service was unreachable. Not suspicious, just the window nobody checked.
Done: what has already been dealt with.

Usage where you will actually look

Your consumption, and what is left of it, appear in Steward's own settings page — not on a billing portal you have to remember to visit. It shows the daily trend, not just a total, because "60% used" does not tell you whether you are about to run out.

Settings

Admin → Steward:

Site key: from your client area, bound to this domain.
Screen new posts: moderation on or off.
Answer questions from your forum: the Ask page on or off.
Trust members after this many posts: members past this count are never screened. 25 by default.
Answer confidence threshold: below this, Steward says it does not know rather than answering from a weak match. 0.62 by default, which suits most forums.

Your usage panel sits at the top of the same page once the key is in.

Install

composer require ernestdefoe/steward
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Enable it, then paste your site key into its settings. The key is bound to one domain and re-checked on every request, so it cannot be used anywhere else.

Requires Flarum 2.0 and PHP 8.3+. A subscription is required: https://ernestdefoe.online/account

Updating

composer update ernestdefoe/steward
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Updating from 1.0.2 or earlier: run this once. Those versions indexed posts in staff-only or restricted tags and posts awaiting approval; this removes them from the hosted index (public posts are left alone).

php flarum steward:withdraw-restricted

Your data

Only public content is ever sent: what a signed-out visitor can read. Posts in private, hidden or restricted-tag discussions, hidden posts and posts awaiting approval are never indexed, and a post that stops being public (moved to a restricted tag, made private, hidden) is withdrawn from the index rather than left behind.

With your own OpenSearch index, every passage that is a forum post is checked against the member asking before it is answered from or cited, so nobody is answered from a thread they cannot open. For that check, index documents should carry a postId field or a /d/<id>-<slug>/<number> link in url.

On hosted retrieval your index is yours alone, and is deleted when you cancel — on the same call that ends the service, not in a cleanup job somebody remembers to run.

Why the pre-filter exists

Moderation runs on every post, unlike an assistant which runs when someone asks. A forum posting 500 times a day is 15,000 screenings a month; sending all of them to a model costs more than the subscription — on precisely the busy forums that need moderation most.

Moderation\PreFilter clears the obviously-fine majority for nothing and escalates only what is genuinely ambiguous. Measured against 486 real posts:

	share
Cleared free	99.4%
Escalated to the model	0.6%

Among untrusted posters only — the population it actually inspects — the escalation rate is 9.7%. Even on a forum where every poster is a newcomer that is roughly $0.51 per 15,000 posts against $5.25 with no pre-filter.

ernestdefoe / steward

Package info

Security

Statistics