Hosting a forum - what forum software?

L

laura

New member
I'm thinking about hosting a forum for one of the communities I'm involved in.

What made y'all choose XenForo? Or any general thoughts/considerations for choosing forum software? From a cursory glance, I'm leaning towards Discourse, maybe Flarum. Both look modern, and Discourse especially has some nice features, like real-time chats.

I'm planning on hosting this via a $10/mo Vultr instance. I'm familiar with setting up simple websites, but this is the first thing that would have any amount of traffic. So if you have any tip/tricks/wisdom that you want to share, I'm all ears.

Thanks :)
 
We tossed around a lot of considerations, things like Discourse was considered, but the structure of discussions is a bit clunky and less organized as you try to have more disjointed discussions. IP.Board, phpBB and vBulletin where on the map but vBulletin had a massive falling out when a major overhaul of their code base lost lots of customers. I used to be an old IP.Board user (before it was IP.Board), but when Invision just up and invalidated our perpetual licenses and told all license holders to get bent they left a sour taste in a lot of our mouth's and vowed to not give them more money.

We found a lot of online communities we were a part of that had forums were mostly XenForo these days, checked the list of features, licensing costs for self-hosted was cheap, annoyingly some big features were coming in v2.3 so we're currently on a release candidate, but it works for what we got for now.

Both Discourse and Flarum take vastly different approach to community organization, if that's what you're going for that's definitely the direction I'd go in. Xenforo is more aimed towards more traditional community organizations which was a goal we were aiming for.

IMO: integrated chat is only handy if I can have always-on clients, via like IRC, XMPP, Slack bridges, something of the sort, if I got to keep the site up to participate in chat it's annoying.


Cool thing is that it's hard to go wrong, this instance sits as a Docker instance on RoushTech's infrastructure on a node running a bunch of docker containers for a bunch of small-time apps and whatnot. These sites rarely take much power so a cheap VPS will handle most traffic fine, and larger nodes aren't much more expensive. Just make sure you got an easy flow for upgrades so you can pull in patches often (or even automated) and you'll be golden. If this wasn't effectively on "free" hosting, piggy backing other business stuff -- we'd be just sitting on a cheap like $5/mo Digital Ocean VPS.
 
Thanks for the detailed write-up!. Really appreciate the context with vBulletin and IP.Board, that would probably never have been on my radar. The hosting info is also reassuring, it feels like I'm missing something by just running it on a cheapo DO instance, but hey, I guess the barrier of entry is just that low nowadays for a low-traffic site.
 
laura said:
it feels like I'm missing something by just running it on a cheapo DO instance
Click to expand...

Most of the things you want covered:

  • Easy patching/upgrades (we got this pretty easy with a docker system we can slap XenForo upgrades on easily)
  • Backups, whether it's managed (full VM backups on your VPS provider) or something you roll yourself (monitor that they're working!)
  • Something like CloudFlare can help protect against bots crushing your system, but honestly most forum software is pretty snappy these days on modern PHP
  • You'll need to make sure you have all dependencies handled:
    • Where do you want to store the DB (a docker container running MySQL is fine for that)
    • What about binaries (images/docs/uploads/etc.)? (We currently store them in a directory on-system but we'll probably upgrade ours to store them on a Minio S3 Container)
    • How are you going to send e-mail? Set up an e-mail server and set up DKIM/SPF? Throw it through Gmail? Use a cloud mail transfer service?
 
Thanks for the list of considerations, having a general sense of all the moving parts helps a lot.

The Docker and email portions might be a bit challenging, but I'll figure it out. I've never used Docker before, but just from some brief research--wow, it sounds much better than just installing everything directly on the same system. Once I figure out Docker, maybe I'll try to understand specifically what Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, etc are (for funsies). I'm amazed that human monkey brain went from live in caves to whatever the trillions of misc software tools/protocols/systems/etc that we have today.
 
StrangeWill said:
@laura curious -- did you end up picking one? How did it go?
Click to expand...
Er, unfortunately not quite. I started working with a more experienced dev who took the lead on this. We talked a bit about forum options, including ones mentioned in this thread, got some basic hosting set up, but then they got busy and we put the project on hold.

Which is okay, I've also been busy with my own dev hobby projects. But I'll check in on them at some point since I'd still like to see this through.
 
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