I was recently tasked with looking for forum solutions to replace phpBB for a contract client and yes there is definitely room. As many others have already sta

I was recently tasked with looking for forum solutions to replace phpBB for a contract client and yes there is definitely room. As many others have already stated phpBB is bloated and anyone who has had to dive through the code knows that it certainly doesn't have Wordpress-like extensibility. There's also the problem of user experience. Having been involved forums for the past few years I never noticed usability problems, but our less tech savvy users made sure to point out their gripes with it (bbcode, images, search). Stackoverflow and Quora certainly raised the bar but they are closed solutions that I still can't put on my own community site. Q&A sites also solve a different problem than forum sites. They're meant to answer questions, not foster discussion. This means that they lack several features of forums such as images and rich text editing. I also looked at Reddit type solutions but they have the same problems with discussions based solely around links. I would love to see a self-hosted solution that's somewhere in-between phpBB, stackoverflow and reddit.