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Seeking Recommendations for Self-Hosted, Community Forum Software
GreenPeace
Member
Hello,
I'm embarking on a project to create a local community forum and I'm in the process of selecting the right software to build it on. My initial research led me to Xenforo, which seems to have a robust set of features suitable for community engagement. However, I'm also considering other self-hosted options before making a final decision.
My criteria for the forum software are as follows:
Self-Hosted: I prefer to have full control over the hosting environment.
One-Time Payment: I'm looking for a software solution where I can make a one-time purchase instead of recurring monthly payments.
Given these requirements, I'm curious to hear from anyone who has experience with XenForo or any other similar forum software that meets the above criteria. Are there any alternatives to XenForo that you would recommend?
Your insights, experiences, and any additional factors to consider when choosing forum software would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts and inputs!
Comments
Flarum, but wait until they release v2.0
Can vouch. Been using Flarum for the past few years now. The only issue I face is that the plugins and themes are not very easily customisable, compared to phpBB, for example. The rest is great.
XenForo is the best you can get if you have the budget to purchase addons/develop them yourself.
Vanil...erm, nvm.
Discourse.
Discourse +1
But considere at least
CPU: 4 cores (fast, CloudCone here)
RAM: 2 GB
Disk: 50 GB
And some S3 backup (backblaze B2 here)
If like me you have an international community, add some CDN (Bunny here)
Considered an imageboard? https://gitgud.io/fatchan/jschan/
Flarum is really cool and modern. As a user, I love it. Mobile is very easy to use.
Flarum
Discourse is all the way to go. While Flarum is still a PHP script, Discourse is an app build with javascript. It's more powerful, and yes, it would use more resources. But anyway, I know someone hosing a Discourse with 20k+ topics on a 1Core+2GRAM vps without problem.
I would recommend against Discourse:
But the big pro: it is a mailing list, you can create new topics, receive replies and reply all using your email client. I basically wanted a mail list with web interface.
I'm running Discource for almost 5 years. If it were today, I won't choose it.
I also consider creating a forum for one of the projects I'm involved into, but the current state of available forum scripts is disappointing.
"Fancy" forums became somehow popular due to their "modern look and feel". But once you start actually using them, you see how bad they are in real life.
Discourse is by far the worst, NodeBB and Flarum are slightly better, but still quite meh.
phpBB and SMF are stable and functional. They don't change much, probably because of reaching their "peak" - they're generally capable of nearly everything one might expect from a forum script. Probably the best free options at the moment.
PunBB and FluxBB looked great, while being lightweight. But both were put into a kind of "maintenance updates" mode. Forks may be worth checking.
Last stable Vanilla looked the best to me. The best combo of speed, kind of "traditional approach", mixed with a modern look.
But after being sold to some "community-as-a-service" company its future appears vague. Probably the saddest twist in this list.
bbPress (and BuddyPress) look somehow similar to Vanilla, but both are noticeably simpler, hence less functional. Also the current status for both is unclear to me - looks like Automattic "just supports them", without much development.
I didn't consider paid options, as the project generates no income, but XenForo and Invision look feasible.
Could be overloaded with money-making/business-targeted features though. I would also expect them to switch to the subscription mode eventually, if that didn't happen already.
I can't agree more! Discourse is quite terrible.
Its popularity (especially in tech-related communities!) is completely beyond my understanding.
If a "discourse-like" forum is a must, then NodeBB is the best of a bad bunch.
Guys, have you been following the project long enough?
I kept an eye on it basically since the beginning, had really high hopes for years, but the snail velocity on their road to version 0.1 and then to 1.0 evaporated my faith completely.
Are you aware of a twelve-year-old developer in their team (who should be older atm, but still)?
Have you estimated possible SEO loss for the longer threads due to the endless scroll feature?
Do you happen to have anything at least somehow resembling LET's mega-threads?
If so, aren't you getting murder threats from your users?
If you have some budget to spend, I'd recommend XenForo. Scale pretty well with your userbase and addons are very expansive.
Otherwise maybe Vanilla/Flarum
Where does vBulletin fit into this discussion?
When I'm searching out a topic, I'm disappointed when I run across a Discourse forum. It's difficult to get the whole page loaded (with several minutes of page-downing to get it to lazy-load the whole thing), and then the disappointment of control-F not working as expected and bringing up some custom searching feature that's really not good.
Oftentimes, I just close the page and look elsewhere.
I was speaking as a user, not an admin/owner. I'm on several flarum driven forums and love them. So easy to keep track of threads I'm participating in, smoothly transitioning between desktop/mobile, very easy to read with the modern clean design.
As far as large threads go, there's sufficient jump buttons to skip up/down, and it automatically goes to unread comments on threads I'm keeping up with. I don't find it any worse in that respect vs similar difficulties on let/wht. I'd imagine there's plugins admins could install to improve that, but most flarums I'm in seem to run pretty lean, maybe vanilla installs.
I've been using forums on the reg for 25 years and I'd say flarum is the cleanest and easiest to use yet. It makes me want to open a forum just to use it, it's that nice as a user. Old style forums are TOO MUCH, if that makes sense. I think that's what flarum does so well, it's borderline minimalist, giving just enough features to be a perfect forum. Well maybe not perfect, but hell it's noticeably nicer than a lot of garbage I've used.
Just thought to recommend the Flarum, Vanilla forum software is not great.
vBulletin?
There is also Waterhole (https://waterhole.dev/), if you want to try something new.
There is als MyBB iirc. And ofc there is also WBB/Woltlab Burning Board: https://www.woltlab.com/en/
Web Assembly
I tried installing AsmBB, a forum written in assembly language. It was interesting. The nerd in me really appreciated it, but I don't think I could recommend it, as it's pretty limited in features and the user interface isn't the best.
Is bbPress a decent option?
I suggest taking a good look at the ages/generations of your userbase as an important factor for what you decide to do.
For example, I personally really like SMF (Simple Machines Forum) for something traditional and straightforward -- and I recently used it for a group for a while and it was solid, reliable, and very easy to setup and maintain. HOWEVER, the group was made up of mostly Millennials and Gen Z people and they did NOT end up engaging with the concept of the forum as much as we all hoped. Especially Gen Z. It wasn't a failure, but the uptake was lower than expected. They seem to be used to more modern community software. And so the project was scrapped and being re-evaluated right now. I think something like Discourse is more suited for that age group.
So just think it through, and consider what people are used to, including their ages... the "older" forum concepts may not be ideal for a mostly younger group. YMMV. Good luck.
Thanks, that is interesting to hear.
My mileage with forums is lower, but unfortunately, it isn't like 5-10 years either
E.g. I've seen working Phorum forum and a UBB threads (classic) one.
From my perspective it's Vanilla, which is the most minimalist and "just what's necessary" (especially on mobile) and OGF is a great example of that (no ajax whistles, badges, and stuff like that).
LET's Vanilla is a bit older version, but quite similar either.
OK, enough blah-blah, thanks again for your detailed reply.
That's a nice find, thanks!
Haven't seen this one before, looks very good on desktop in dark mode. Sad that self-hosted version requires a license.
Wanted to mention myBB as well, remembered about them as well next day after my post above.
MyBB was quite popular back in the days, but I haven't seen an active MyBB forum for quite a while.
WBB is similar - my city's local forum was rather big and active about 10-15 years ago, but I haven't seen any other one running WBB since then.
OK, back to the topic.
I went through my bookmarks in the meantime and here's what I found:
AsmBB, forum written in Assembler (!!) Already mentioned either, but I believe it still deserves to be linked, as the project is quite unique:
https://asmbb.org/what-is-asmbb.1/ || https://asm32.info/ || https://board.asm32.info/
ElkArte - SMF fork, which declares being "modernized and feature rich forum package to meet the demands of today's message board user" - https://www.elkarte.net/
They also have a Flarum-like style for those who prefer it over the classic look: https://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=4010.0
ForkBB - PunBB fork, which is considered to be in beta, but is already used in production by several large communities: https://github.com/forkbb/forkbb || https://forkbb.ru/
P.S.
Check the first link for AsmBB above (
asmbb.org). I didn't manage to try AsmBB myself yet (although the geek in me is very curious), but at least their default forum skin looks really nice and modern (switch to the dark mode).I am a longtime amateur computer user (not professional) and have a hobby that I wanted to build a forum for -- but with the public message board aspect being secondary to the primary goal of presenting content about 2000 different events.
Basically, I created a thread for each event, and I write unique content for each as the first/top message, then open it for the public to post relevant additional info and commentary about each event. The goal is having organized, hard-wired verticals for long-term accumulation of information into the proper silo, with excellent TAGGING functions to allow for connecting items thematically ACROSS the 2000 event verticals.
I spent 6 months playing with SMF, myBB, and phpBB, looked closely into Vanilla and Discourse, and ultimately Flarum. I fell in love with Flarum, perhaps irrationally, but the prominence and attractiveness of its tags/category system seduced me.
In the next 6 months I have spent probably every waking leisure hour installing, tweaking, adding extensions, and adding content by posting messages. In the meantime, I moved my Flarum from a shared hosting environment (you need SSH to install Composer, or Softaculous in cPanel or VPS control panel to install Flarum), to a tiny VPS (it worked), then to a more powerful VPS and I have experienced and learned a great deal.
Here's what I wish I knew at the outset, although I do not want to leave Flarum for at least a decade or two.
-- It is currently at version 1.8.5, with 2.0 sometime off in the future. There is no real "end user" level support -- if you have a problem, the good folks on the forum expect you to be very proficient with Linux, PHP (and extensions), Composer, and maybe even to write your own extension to provide lacking functionality (way beyond my ability).
Solutions are out there, but there is no "canonical" voice -- you usually have to use Google to find a half-dozen on-point messages and triangulate amongst them, or just try all the suggestions until something somehow fixes your issue.
-- There is presently NO export utility, official or otherwise, to ANY other forum. If you need to switch off of Flarum, you need to reverse engineer your mySQL/mariaDB database and somehow map all the tables and fields correctly to their equivalents in the other forum.
-- Things other forums have built-in are provided externally from "extensions" (plug-ins) that you need to find (if they exist) and install, and then they mostly just magically work (there is almost no explanation of how they work or even what they do). The model is very minimalistic, with add-ins for any "features" you want. As an example, there is an extension for "likes" and a separate extension for "dislikes".
-- Moving from server to server can be a nightmare (it was for me, I intentionally never asked anyone for help), but the upside is you will learn Linux, PHP extensions, all the different releases of PHP in Linux distros, mySQL and Flarum a lot faster that way.
-- There's no way to know what 2.0 will look like/how it will work differently unless you are a GitHub-level end-user and understand open-source software development conducted by a bunch of random geniuses. But I have faith it will be even better.
-- When it gets installed correctly, and you get it populated with messages, it seems to work FLAWLESSLY, it's sort of amazing. I think the PHP code underneath is really carefully crafted. Endless editing of messages, deleting messages, inserting links and videos etc. all just work without throwing errors or requiring manual correction. When it doesn't work (usually after an attempted installation), it's usually just a white screen of death with zero info on what to do next.
All in all, I love Flarum, I am glad I didn't give up on it and need to start all over from scratch, copying and pasting thousands of posts etc. into other forum software, but I was freaked out knowing there is presently no way out.
I hope this helps someone.
Yeah, I also remember MyBB being very popular back in the days. These days I mostly see SMF, Vanilla, and XenoForo. XenoForo only in an older community though. WBB was used a lot by german forums I used to visit back in the days, and according to WBB website government institutions as well as Netcup are using WBB for their forums. WBB also mentions that Siemens, DB, Gameforge and Hetzner are relying on Woltlab.