Table 2.

Candidate tools and implementation

Tool	Aim
For people with mental health difficulties, referrers and commissioners
Knowledge exchange video/animation tools	Widening access and promoting greater uptake through better understanding of the role of online mental health forums and how they work. These tools will describe how online forums work, possible benefits, for who and how to identity safe and supportive forums.
For forum moderators
Community of practice	Building capacity through facilitating mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared practice. Such support is crucial to continuing professional development (CPD), and to prevent compassion fatigue and burnout. Openly available to all the moderators involved in our study and providing a safe online space for the forum to evolve from the outset of the study.
E-learning curricula	To train and support moderators in reflexive practice including understanding the moderator role; ethics of moderation; encouraging activity; understanding mental health; spotting moments of change (introductory linguistic analysis); managing challenging situations; widening access and welcoming diversity; identifying and managing risks; looking after yourself; role of supervision and peer support; signposting; CPD. The content will draw on challenges described by moderators during our interviews, and practical case examples of ways to manage these.
For forum providers/hosts, commissioners and policy makers
Best practice design principles for online mental health forums	To widen access, maximise positive impacts and minimise harms. This guidance will provide the following: (1) High level design principles to guide forum design and moderation. (2) Practical guidance for implementing design features to improve usefulness and safety of online forums. (3) Examples of best practice and case studies on forum design and moderation practices.
Resource requirements for implementation of best practice design principles based on the disaggregation of the programme theories into resources and reasoning	This will be based on the disaggregation of the programme theories into resources and reasoning and will provide information on the resource configuration necessary to provide safe and effective online community.
Standardised forum characterisation and evaluation framework	To support standardised evaluation and comparison of forums during commissioning
Methodological guidance on how to evaluate online mental health forums	To provide guidance for evaluation of efficacy and effectiveness
For further theory and practice development
Programme theory	To generate a theory that is generalisable to online mental health forums and with relevance to understanding online peer support interventions across healthcare.