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Ask HN: State of Internet forums

2 points by dylz ↗ HN
I need a forum. I do not have much money to spend for this (personal thing; probably can do up to $49-59).

What is the stablest/greatest/latest thing out there with at least some plugins, and preferably a way to implement a single SSO system against an existing database with at least a few thousand users?

* I can't afford vBulletin, Xenforo, etc.

* Last I checked, phpBB no longer serves downloads temporarily due to some hack, or something, I don't know.

* SMF's community and ecosystem is kind of terrible.

* FluxBB is nice, but I'm waiting for the laravel release for integration, otherwise migrating will be another pain.

* PunBB is basically an abandoned FluxBB?

* NodeBB, FlaskBB seem really immature at this point, or at least not enough moderation tools or other management, and I am not comfortable enough in node.js to do manual editing.

* esoTalk is nice, but effectively stalled while waiting for Flarum.

* Discourse's resource usage is a bit on the high side, and I am not comfortable enough in rails/ruby to do manual editing.

* Why are the vast majority of forums in PHP?

5 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] thread
lowken10
Check out Discourse.org. I set this for for Dane Maxwell & Andy Drish of the Foundation and it is a solid modern forum solution. And it's open source.
hardwaresofton
I think the mast majority of forum software is in PHP, because it's what was around long ago when forums were in their hayday...

Unfortunately I don't have any good suggestions one way or the other on which forum software you should use.

krapp
> Why are the vast majority of forums in PHP?

Easy - the vast majority of forums are set up by people who just want a forum, and aren't necessarily technically savvy, and PHP is dead simple to deploy to on a free shared account. Most of the popular forums are dead now because forums in general have been supplanted by social media, and hosted services.

It's kind of unfortunate because I think there is still a place for self-hosted forums.

MrBra
Since you checked many of them, did you also take a look at Mybb?