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Used phpbb long back and was good. dont know now.
Flarum and nodebb
LET using old-style forum Vanilla. The latest future functionality one would be Discourse.
Flarum is modern but they are in beta for like 4-5 years
after following it for 2-3 years, i gave up on them.
I've installed it on my vm. works fine. But vanilla is best and easy!
I have been using SMF on all my forums.
Free or paid?
For free SMF is good enought.
Too ugly
There is never an official version
Discourse I like
What about vBulletin, IPB, Woltlab? Of free ones I prefer phpbb.
ipb & xenforo
phpbb Too ugly
Appearance is very important
xenforo very good
You can use custom themes/styles. This one is a paid style but there are also couple nice free ones: https://themeforest.net/item/marina-responsive-retina-ready-phpbb3-theme/6509951
https://www.discourse.org/ ?
phpBB or vBulletin or Vanilla - with a nice template.
FluxBB is very lite, very speedy, but no add-ons and not so many options.
A couple of forums I visit, use NodeBB
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB
Demo
https://try.nodebb.org/
The most powerful, feature reach, great but both paid: xenforo & ipb.
I do not know any so user-friendly, so customized, and so big communities around forum software with almost everything you need (xenforo store) to do any crazy idea that you want (themes, plugins, customization, graphic content, etc.).
I have several communities, big, small, medium-sized.
People more and more moving from forums to discord channels.
Because they prefer real-time chatting instead of writing posts, waiting for answers, and reacting to these answers.
I think this is somehow related to the hype-train, where everyone wants to jump in.
But for some big slice of the conversations in threads stored on my forums between members useless and can be safely replaced via any chatting software (xenforo has a plugin for that) or discord.
In 2020, I tried to launch a new community for something. This board must be some support forum for software. And I got blamed, the forum-type community for a group of people in 2020 mauve's ton, and better need to create a discord channel where everyone is sitting right now or telegram channel.
Purchase xenforo license, best forum ever.
I tried dozens of forums software, and all mentioned in the thread.
I have no money - nodebb not so bad, or consider to build your community with Discord or telegram.
There's also https://forem.dev
It feels more like Medium, with each member writing blog posts and others can comment.
Major installation is https://dev.to
plenty of options: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-forum-software
Don't do this, you lose all your ad revenue, your community can be closed any time, you can't export your users and move to a different forum if you ever had to.
If you have literally no resources on your VPS that can be used I'd recommend FlaskBB or MiniBB. Both worked perfectly for me.
I like Vanilla, is simple on both end ... You have choices, Install some and see.
Is MyBB still a thing?
They are alive for years and it's not possible with them to limit link posting by user post count and other issues :-( Not so happy with them
FluxBB Not modern enough and not pretty
I have used this before, it looks good
Been using smf for forever. No issue so far.
I like this, I will try it
I was a developer on SMF 15 years ago (wow the time has gone by quickly... here's an intro I wrote about myself for the SMF blog in 2006: https://simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=138326.0. I've still got my
[email protected]email address too). Isn't it kinda dead these days though? It's a good piece of software and was the best forum system available 10 years ago, but I think development of SMF 2.1 is kinda... stagnant now.Install a nicer theme then. You don't have to sick with the default one