Meta is giving its Forum app another round of updates, this time putting more weight behind the people who actually make online communities useful.
The company is testing a new recognition system for standout contributors in Facebook Groups, alongside expanded AI-powered discovery features and topic labels. The changes are part of Meta’s effort to turn Forum into a more focused place for questions, recommendations and firsthand advice rather than another endless social feed.
Forum has been in testing since May 2026 and connects directly with Facebook Groups. Users sign in with their Facebook account, find communities they already belong to and discover others built around their interests. The standalone app is currently available on iOS and Android in the United States.
Meta Wants Better Contributors to Stand Out
Meta is changing the way useful members are recognized inside its communities. The company is introducing a new contributor role designed to highlight people who consistently add value through practical answers, firsthand knowledge, recommendations and meaningful discussion. It is less about simply being active and more about being useful.
Members who receive the recognition will get a visible badge and additional benefits. Meta says one of those benefits is faster publishing, which could be particularly useful inside groups where posts normally need administrator approval. The badge gives other users a clearer signal that the person behind a comment or post has built a strong reputation within the community.
The new system also replaces Meta’s previous contributor badges and Group Expert designation. Rather than maintaining several different recognition labels, Meta appears to be consolidating them around a broader idea of meaningful contribution.
Group administrators can grant the role directly to members they believe deserve it. Meta can also recommend possible candidates, although administrators remain involved in deciding who gets recognized. Members receive a notification when the role is assigned and can remove themselves if they do not want the badge.
Meta says the feature is initially being tested through Forum in the United States and across Facebook more broadly.
Forum Is Becoming More About Answers Than Posts
Forum increasingly looks less like a conventional Facebook feed and more like a searchable community knowledge layer. Instead of simply scrolling through whatever was posted most recently, Meta wants users to arrive with a question and quickly reach discussions that might actually help them.
That approach is built around Ask, Forum’s AI-assisted question feature. Ask uses existing posts and comments from Facebook Groups to surface answers based on previous community discussions. Those responses can pull from groups a user has already joined as well as public communities they may not have encountered before.
Meta is also testing ways to make those results more useful. One feature can help users compare recommendations when deciding between products, books, gifts or other options. Another can suggest follow-up questions based on previous searches, making it easier to keep digging into a subject without beginning again from scratch.
It is a subtle change, but potentially an important one. Good answers posted months ago no longer have to disappear under an avalanche of newer content. Forum gives Meta another way to bring older community knowledge back into view.
Topic Labels Could Make Group Discussions Easier to Discover
Meta is also experimenting with topic labels as another way of organizing conversations. Posts may receive labels around subjects such as Korean food, solo travel or other specific interests, allowing users to jump directly into related discussions.
That could help solve one of the longstanding problems with large online communities: useful information is often buried inside individual groups. Even when the answer already exists somewhere on Facebook, finding it can be difficult unless a user knows which group to search.
Topic-based browsing gives Meta another route into those discussions. Instead of navigating community by community, users may be able to move across subjects and discover relevant conversations wherever they happen to be hosted.
For Facebook Groups, that could mean useful posts gain a longer life. Their value would no longer depend entirely on when they were published or how visible they remain inside one group’s feed.
There Is an AI Story Behind Forum
Forum’s focus on questions, useful answers and structured community knowledge also intersects with Meta’s broader AI strategy. The company describes Ask as an AI-powered tool that surfaces posts and comments from Facebook Groups and builds responses around information shared by real people.
Social Media Today raised another angle. Well-organized community discussions could also become valuable material for Meta’s AI systems, much in the same way public forum content elsewhere on the internet has become important for AI search and conversational tools.
Meta has not publicly framed Forum as an AI training project. Its official messaging focuses on helping people discover useful advice, recommendations and real experiences from communities. The suggestion that Forum could also support Meta’s wider AI development remains an interpretation rather than a stated purpose.
Still, the overlap is obvious. Human-generated answers are useful to someone searching for advice. They can also provide rich context for AI-powered discovery systems trying to surface relevant information.
Forum sits directly between those two uses.
Facebook Groups Are Getting a Different Kind of Second Life
Meta is not asking users to abandon Facebook Groups and rebuild their communities somewhere else. Forum works by pulling those existing groups into a different interface and organizing the experience around discovery and answers.
That matters because Meta already has years of community conversations sitting inside Facebook. Forum gives the company a way to repackage that material without requiring people to create entirely new networks from zero.
Posts created through Forum remain connected to their underlying Facebook Groups. The new contributor badges, AI-powered Ask feature and topic labels then sit on top of that existing community structure.
The result is a different way of using Facebook Groups. Instead of opening a group, scanning the newest posts and hoping somebody recently discussed the subject you care about, Forum tries to surface the most relevant knowledge first.
Whether people want a separate app for that experience is still an open question. Meta, however, appears to be pushing Forum toward something more specific than another social app. It wants to make Facebook Groups easier to search, easier to navigate and more useful when someone simply needs an answer.
What It Means for Community Managers
For Facebook Group administrators, the new contributor system could provide another way to encourage quality participation. People who repeatedly answer questions, provide reliable recommendations or share useful firsthand experience can now receive more visible recognition.
That may change how participation is rewarded inside larger communities. Posting frequently has always been easy to measure. Measuring whether someone is consistently helpful is harder. Meta’s new badge system appears to be trying to emphasize the latter.
The discovery changes could matter just as much. If Forum increasingly surfaces helpful discussions outside the group where they were originally posted, strong community content could reach users who are not yet members.
That gives brands, publishers and community managers a simple reason to pay attention. Useful conversations may have more long-term value than sheer posting volume.
Meta’s bet is becoming clearer: the strongest part of Facebook Groups may not be how much content they produce. It may be the people inside them who actually know something worth sharing.
Sources
Meta Newsroom — Find Your Community With Forum, a Dedicated App for Facebook Groups
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/find-community-forum-dedicated-app-facebook-groups/
Social Media Today — Meta Adds Contributor Badges to Forum Chat App
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-adds-contributor-badges-to-forum-chat-app/831717/