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Open source Vanilla seems to not be doing well: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-go-now https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/392

Open source Vanilla seems to not be doing well: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-go-now https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-.... It's a shame. I thought it had a nice UI: mobile-friendly, not very flashy, around 300K per page (less if assets are cached), rendered on the server. I wanted to migrate my FluxBB forum to Vanilla, since FluxBB is effectively discontinued in favor of Flarum. If I migrate my forum now, it will probably be to Flarum. https://www.unitedbsd.com/ https://www.unitedbsd.com/ runs it, and I seem to like the experience of browsing it more than Discourse forums (edit: but I still prefer paginated forums without infinite scrolling). It also helps that Flarum has lower system requirements than Discourse. The forum migration tool https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter targets both Vanilla and Flarum, though I haven't actually attempted a migration with it, so I don't know how useful it really is. I rejected NodeBB because MongoDB is no longer developed under a free license. I'll list some other forum software I have considered in case you find it useful: Fossil Forums (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki), nimforum (https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum), Talkyard (https://github.com/debiki/talkyard https://github.com/debiki/talkyard), Misago (https://github.com/rafalp/Misago https://github.com/rafalp/Misago), FlaskBB (https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb). All of these have less momentum behind them than Flarum. Most are lightweight. I found it very appropriate that nimforum's name is inconsistently capitalized. :-) I am still kind of amazed that Fossil has integrated a forum and a chatroom. During my research I also found an interesting fork of SMF: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte.

o_____________o 4y ago
fwiw I've come to similar conclusions, though I think Discourse has higher potential. For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app. I'm doing some tests on a DigitalOcean instance and it doesn't seem that resource hungry so far. The Flarum community seems much more friendly, DIY and open. Having to use PHP in 2023 is a little depressing, but it would presumably integrate more easily into other PHP projects like Wordpress. I was hoping to use NodeBB for the pure js stack but it's missing some important features and the front end is greybearded out of using a modern framework because of "speed"[1]. You can use Postgres instead of Mongo, by the way: > NodeBB Forum Software is powered by Node.js and supports either Redis, MongoDB, or a PostgreSQL database [1]: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/14371/nodebb-reactjs/3?_=1675708346960&lang=en-US https://community.nodebb.org/topic/14371/nodebb-reactjs/3?_=...
- networked 4y ago
  > For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app. Honestly, if I was going to pay for a forum, I'd probably go with (self-hosted) XenForo from the start. It has the most polished user experience of any forum software I have seen. I understand people sell custom mobile apps for it, too, though I haven't really looked. I thought using NodeBB with PostgreSQL was not recommended for production. Looks like I was wrong. Thanks for telling me.

o_____________o 4y ago

fwiw I've come to similar conclusions, though I think Discourse has higher potential. For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app. I'm doing some tests on a DigitalOcean instance and it doesn't seem that resource hungry so far. The Flarum community seems much more friendly, DIY and open. Having to use PHP in 2023 is a little depressing, but it would presumably integrate more easily into other PHP projects like Wordpress. I was hoping to use NodeBB for the pure js stack but it's missing some important features and the front end is greybearded out of using a modern framework because of "speed"[1]. You can use Postgres instead of Mongo, by the way: > NodeBB Forum Software is powered by Node.js and supports either Redis, MongoDB, or a PostgreSQL database [1]: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/14371/nodebb-reactjs/3?_=1675708346960&lang=en-US https://community.nodebb.org/topic/14371/nodebb-reactjs/3?_=...

networked 4y ago
> For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app. Honestly, if I was going to pay for a forum, I'd probably go with (self-hosted) XenForo from the start. It has the most polished user experience of any forum software I have seen. I understand people sell custom mobile apps for it, too, though I haven't really looked. I thought using NodeBB with PostgreSQL was not recommended for production. Looks like I was wrong. Thanks for telling me.