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The Best Forum Software
#1
I'm looking into building a small public forum. Thanks to the wonderful FOSS developers of the world, there's plenty of ready made solutions available: which is great but it can make the process of choosing somewhat difficult.

As for what I'm looking for:
  • I want it to be as small and light as possible for running on a small VPS (0.5GB RAM)
  • Internal messaging system for maintaining user accounts
So far I've tried a few options, some of which would work, but none that scream out to me "this is the one!"

The wordpress method:
Wordpress has a few nice forum plugins. I've tried bbpress, asgoros, and WPForo.

I didn't really like the formatting/appearance of bbpress. Asgoros and WPForo I like much better, and they're easy to set up, but additional plugins would be necessary for internal messaging. I tried to implement this on both asgoros and wpforo but when I installed the user messaging plugin things start breaking. Those plugins may not be designed to play nice together.

full featured forums: php bulletin board and simple machine forum are two well known FOSS forums with years of development and strong communities/documentation backing them. Both of these could work, but there's a lot more options/complexity with set up. I recently installed phpbb3 and it looks great and would do everything I want, but the admin area looks like a mess to me. So many options all over the place, I feel like it would take weeks or months of studies to figure out what everything does. SMF has always been known as a powerful full featured forum, but not necessarily designed with minimalism in mind.

flat file forums: small and light with no database, there's a few flat file forum softwares.  I really liked the look, ease of setup, and speed of flatboard, but I have yet to find any flat file forum with internal messaging built in.

Other options: finding a forum I like and adding messaging to it. If the software I'm looking for with the features I want doesn't exist, there's always the option to modify an existing software and add internal messaging to it, without reinventing the wheel. I did manage to write a very simple chat server in php for another project, which would be similar to an internal messaging system, but before I decide on this more labor intensive solution I think I owe it to myself to explore every other option.

so here's the opportunity for discussion:

Do you have any experience operating a forum? If so, what software did you use? How would you rate it in terms of ease of use and performance?. What features does it have that you  like? What's the development schedule like? Are there any licensing restrictions? How is the documentation/support?


Messages In This Thread
The Best Forum Software - by fitkoh - 12-12-2020, 05:43 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by deanhills - 12-12-2020, 07:30 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by TrK - 12-13-2020, 11:17 AM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by xdude - 12-13-2020, 02:57 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by fitkoh - 12-13-2020, 05:53 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by tbelldesignco - 12-14-2020, 02:32 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by fitkoh - 12-14-2020, 04:58 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by tbelldesignco - 12-14-2020, 08:31 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by fitkoh - 12-15-2020, 03:31 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by tbelldesignco - 12-15-2020, 05:09 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by deanhills - 12-17-2020, 10:36 AM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by Rehan - 12-17-2020, 02:45 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by tbelldesignco - 12-17-2020, 03:58 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by LightDestory - 12-17-2020, 06:24 PM
RE: The Best Forum Software - by deanhills - 12-18-2020, 04:08 PM

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