Which Forum Software do you like (aside from Vanilla)?
This discussion is based on a merely playful note by @AnthonySmith about changing the forum to phpBB, but since Vanilla is sort of EOL iirc, what other forum software is there that you like?
@AnthonySmith said:
@WSS said:
Another one fell off the wagon. Remember when we used to have a less shitty forum than vanilla?My first action as a mod with no actual access will be to convert this to phpbb
I saw that @bikegremlin uses XenoForo. While it's paid, it's a Forum Engine I, as a forum user, very much liked. I've been a forum member for many years in a community using XenoForo. Woltlab Burning Board was also nice, but I think both are paid. There's also phpBB, Phorum (someone mentioned) and maybe others. What would be the ideal Forum Engine these days?
Comments
Usenet
I am old, so I still appreciate the seperation and logical nature of vBulletin and phpBB, that generic old school mid 2000's era forum style, but it seems these days most people want everything new right in front of them without having to do the dance of going to get the new content.
I get it, it is engagement hacking, vanilla would never have been my first choice, in fact if I remember right, Flarum was my first choice, it was just not mature enough and at the time I lacked the skills to basically reproduce what we have now in Flarum.
It was only ever done like this if I am being brutally honest, to create a familiar environment when LET got forked into here, which, in my opinion, was the reason the other 2 forks failed, not because of the people or the intent; this community was built around a format.
Could it change now? probably.
Should it? possibly.
Would it be fun? No x10000 (to convert to an existing thing)
I think, honestly, given the current situation with Vanilla Open Source not being maintained as of January 2025, I would dump the database and maintain a bespoke solution that looks and acts almost exactly the same, but is going to be more maintainable in the long run and then in the back end actually acts like something written for a hosting community.
Would be a fun project to take it to the next level, and provide multiple front ends for depending on preference, i mean... how often do you use the tag cloud?
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Does anyone know of a way to move an existing bbPress forum to a newer modern forum software?
Say what you will, but I've seen websites running SMF that haven't been touched in 15 years and they haven't been compromised (yet).
Other than their politics, XenForo is fine, and hence, any of the other rebuilds of vB and everything else from that era- except OpenBB. It had holes so big that it died. Shame, because it was better designed graphically and on userlevel basis than phpBB ever was.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
yep SMF is like debain... so what if I still run version 5 in prod
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Yeah. I've got a Devuan instance that started out as.. Lenny, too. Just incrementally updated and kept through-line. Same deal with my 25 year old blog. I turned my data into an RSS feed, imported into TextPattern, made a handful of shims, and I've had stable URLs for data that has no reason to be on the Internet any longer other than the fact that I can.
Hell, you hosted an archive of it for me a few years ago. Thanks again for that. Funny that you came back to the system before I did.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
Yup.
Our local motorcycle forum was running PHP 5.4 and old SMF.
Had to update it when support in the usual shared hosting environment was gone.
Still on SMF, newer, and newer PHP. Looks like shit now because I suck at design (and it has been abandoned more-less), but hack free still.
https://www.motomanijaci.com/
No hacks, no problems.
Even looks OK on mobile.
Still, for forum software, my vote goes to XenForo as the least bad.
Why I chose Xenforo after having tested a bunch both as a user, mod, and even admin in many cases:
https://www.bikegremlin.net/threads/why-i-chose-to-build-my-forum-with-xenforo.38/
Yes, I do consider time (and energy) as a precious and limited resource.
And yes, that t-shirt is still for sale! LOL.
Yachts won't pay for themselves.
I am particularly proud for finding a way to put Google Analytics and AdSense enabled only for the not-logged-in users.
That's probably the win-win scenario. Costs get covered, and users don't get bothered (even without any adblockers).
How I added that:
https://www.bikegremlin.net/threads/forum-adverts-google-adsense-poll.397/#post-2857
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That's a pretty cool way to do it.
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I suppose it also shows my first language as a child was BASIC (on Commodore 64, along with some basic machine to try and get those sounds and colours going).
Hmmm - I think that is Pascal though, on second thought. LOL.
Apart from the all-caps form.
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That's fair re:SMF. I actually have a forum still running SMF 2.1.4 myself, and apparently need to update to 2.1.6! Though it's no longer open, only archived, which reduces a lot of the attack surface.
Discourse is really good. Clean UI, nice editor, integrations, it just works. BUT I don't like the infinite scrolling.
Gross.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
So you don't like Facebook, reddit, Instagram, twitter, tiktok or any of the hundred thousand modern infinite scroll that seems to be all the rage now a days?
From a user perspective I have pretty high regard for Xenforo. I just expect the hammer to eventually fall like it does for all other non-FOSS software. So I'd hesitate before choosing it from the sysop side even if I were willing to pay for it in the short run.
I hate Discourse. Too much bloat.
I sometimes think about writing forum software myself, but it always circles back to thinking NNTP works perfectly fine on the back end and I'm personally happy to access it with Usenet client software. I can see some attraction to having a good web front end for it though, as the existing ones that I know of all suck.
I guess Lemmy/Piefed is another thing to consider, even if you don't want to federate the backend with ActivityPub.
No. In fact, I don't have an account on any of those mentioned.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
Well, LES is more thæn just you. I am sure the majority of the rest of the 10k users have an account in atleast one of those above listed social medias.
old.reddit.com and Red Reader don't have infinite scroll. They are way better than www.reddit.com or the reddit app.
I wonder if fossil-scm.org could be adapted into a forum. It's intended as a software source control system but it also has a wiki and bug tracker built in. It's written in C with sqlite as the backing store, and it is small and speedy.
I have to say the below is pretty cool. Dunno if I'd want to actually use it, but that's besides the point
.
https://board.asm32.info/
I dont like clicking every picture to see the post. I prefer if the post is viewable without additional clicks. Saves my mouse
Did you follow the FOSS Wordpress drama?
Enshitification is prevalent, so either way you must always be on your toes.
Current XenForo licence is lifetime, and the platform is popular enough to have some migration options if it goes to shit.
Yup. It is like a social network wannabe.
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I also loved vBulletin.. like version 3 or something like that. I used to love paying full price for it and modding the theme for whatever hobby I was interested in at the time when I was a young whipper snapper. I do appreciate Xenforo. And I also appreciate phpBB.
Discourse is really neat but there's just something about it that I can't quite put my finger on.. it feels off. Maybe too modern for my retro brain
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail
vBullying was bought by Internet Brands. It started enshitification, and the top devs moved out to start XenForo (and Internet Brats took them to court for doing that!).
Now, vBulletin is still being developped, but it would not be my first choice.
bikeforums.net is owned by Internet Brands too (that's the largest of cycling forums if you like, with some legendary members like Sheldon Brown and Relja Novovic
), and it runs vBulletin. A mobile-friendly forum version was pushed relatively recently, but I am not sure if that was a vBulletin limitation or forum's legacy customizations were not easy to update.
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I think this pretty much nails it, at the end of the day it's just a database, we could (given time) have multiple front ends. I had fun in rust with a single rule... Avoid JavaScript as much as possible when creating backtogeek.com nothing on it but shitty test posts now it has a mod and admin interface and a karma system and 6 lines of js in total.
Whole thing is now down to 21mb which includes the os and kernel, I can technically drop it to 19mb if I make it hard for me to access to VPS it runs on.
It's on a TierHive 128mb 1gb disk VPS.
I will finish it one day.
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You are wrong there. It is FOR social media wannabes
Just the right amount of JS makes the website feel responsive and makes the user happy. Too much of it makes the browser slow and users unhappy.
In my websites, I'll still use JS to load data into tables and forms but will not use JS for page navigations.
Ah, the famous "I'll finish it once day" statement. I've given up on countless projects classified under that category
I started putting them on my desktop, so I am forced to look at them... or at least that was the plan.
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ASM!!!??? Haha! Wow!
Like I care.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
That's the correct attitude to have
Social media is just for people to brag "look, my life is better thæn yours". If you care too much about "blending in" you will just suffer mental burnout. If you care to "show off" you'll just end up bankrupt (unless you are filthy rich). So avoid it = best attitude.
Anyway, I have reddit for browsing funny things and facebook cause i signed up. Dont use facebook anymore since 2015? Do use linkedin to look for jobs when I am jobless though
Ya, that aint gonna work...
Human mind is weird. If you keep looking at something, your brain goes "ok, that's always there, ignore it". That's how our brain processes data. There needs to be a change in what you are looking at for your brain to register it. So if you put it on the desktop, your brain will register it as a change, but after a week, it'll be ignored again
You talk more than a biological female. Are you drunk?
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
I miss my small motard.
Can't complaint about my Honda NC7500, but it is definitely not a fun bike.
Just to be on topic, I had some contact with phpBB, neither good or bad, that worked, but it was prone to crashes if you look too much into it...
The river runs towards the sea, but the sea is never full...
Isn't everyone here, most of the time?!?
Did I hit the wrong gay forum again?!
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Self-made with sveltekit in the front-end and rust in the backend would be such a cool combo.
Hey @willie!
Thanks for posting about the board.asm32.info forum which runs on assembly language! Based on a quick glance, it seems to look great both on my phone and on my Chromebook.
I had a lot of fun looking briefly at the board.asm32 forum and also at other related websites!
For example, I learned about Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language.
I also saw the Fresh IDE, an assembly IDE.
I found out about yet another forum, the flat assembler message board.
In connection with the flat assembler message board, see also https://github.com/tgrysztar (flat assembler source code) and rwasa ("ull-featured, high performance, scalable web server designed to compete with the likes of nginx. It has been built from the ground-up with no external library dependencies entirely in x86_64 assembly language").
Maybe I will download some code, take a look, and try to run something. Thanks again for posting about the board.asm32.info forum!
Best!
Tom
I just noticed that one of the forums I frequent uses MyBB. So that still exists, too! Still remember it from the old days.
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
Fwiw, MyBB seems to have a "MergeSystem" that allows to directly import Vanilla Forums into it:
https://mybb.com/download/merge-system/
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
What other forum software can a bbPress forum be imported to?
Gotta say asmbb would be even more impressive if it handle its own message store instead of using sqlite
.
Don't know.
I am very glad that when I started using Wordpress, I checked out the popular/available forum plugins and decided that a separate, dedicated forum software is the way to go if I decide to run a forum.
Can't remember the exact reason(s) why I concluded that - but I don't think that migration was one of them, didn't even get to that. Generally, AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong), migrations are not very rosy for any forum software. In my experience, even major version updates of the same software can break things, not to mention moving to a whole different forum software.
According to Google, it seems that phpBB is most widely supported for imports (and that XenForo is close to being 2nd or at least top 3 in those terms). The rest is hit-and-miss, even when there is "official" support for importing (this does seem to be correct).
Edit/P.S.
Vanilla will probably become a dead-end both in terms of software develpment and migration paths. In those terms, a prudent move would be to migrate to Xenforo (software quality and ease of management, plus support). However, the legacy software will probably run for 10 more years on a VPS (no need to update anything if it is reasonably secure) - and who plans for more than a year ahead today anyway?
Forums will probably go the way of Usenet and dinosaurs in the following 5 to 10 years (if not sooner).
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
Replace these public forums with private forums where one user interacts with 10 AI bots, each with their own personality. That will be a more fun place