Ask HN: Advice on forum software

2 points by pkdevil 14y ago ↗ HN

I am looking to create a niche community website (100 to 1000 users in the beginning) with a discussion forum. I had a look at some of the popular software (vBulletin/phpBB - also tried searching on forummatrix.org) but somehow I find most of them to be lacking in one way or the other. I hope HN community can help me if they have any personal experience with running forums.

Here are some of my thoughts on what I am looking for (in the order of preference).

1. Good/Modern UI - What I found most surprising in my search is that most of the available software have a UI that is practically the same and it looks like all of them are stuck with their default UI for the last 7-8 years (if you are a regular on vBulletin-powered forums you would know what I mean). It is possible that there may be some custom themes that provide a UI that look stylish in which case I would like to know about them too. The closest I could find to my taste was Ning but I had to rule out Ning for other reasons (see point 2).

2. Hosting - F/OSS is desirable since I would like to know what goes on inside but I am not particular. However, I need to be able to host the site on hosting providers of my choice. This was the reason I ruled out Ning. Also, some time back I heard about Ning shutting down websites on flimsy grounds, so I prefer to have some measure of control.

3. Chat - I hope to have a lot of private messaging between users so an unobtrusive chat plugin would be desirable (like the Chat feature in Gmail). It should support group chat(multi-user).

4. Social networking - Profiles/friend-ing(for lack of a better word)/photos/likes etc. would be nice purely in the interest of building relationships between users but it is not a core feature. Voting on stories/topics ala HN is not necessary.

5. Tech support - I should be able to jump in and resolve most technical issues but I would rather focus on managing/growing the community, so I would like to see some decent support for troubleshooting issues.

Even if you do not know specifically about the software, I would appreciate if you can point me to some well-designed forum sites that you personally like.

2 comments

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pkdevil 14y ago ↗

Strange. When I added the question I did not put the ":" after "Ask HN" so this did not go into the "ask" tab. But even after editing it now, it is still shown only on the "new" tab (rather than ask).

Can a mod help in moving this question to the Ask tab? I am afraid it is getting buried in the "new" section.

Coming to think of it, what I would probably like is the clean UI of Basecamp's discussions but that still supports certain forum features that users come to expect (the quote button/embedding media etc).