Best forum software
I'd like to add a forum to www.bitcompare.net
The reason is I'd like it to become more of a community where people can share tips and ideas around DeFi and crypto wealth management.
Does anyone have recommendations to build the forum. Full custom, or is there an off-the-shelf solution that could be good?
Thanks!
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I spent a whole lot of time trying to find the best solution for community building. Here's the progression:
Started with https://discourse.org/
Moved to https://community.nodebb.org/
Moved back to https://discourse.org/
Tried https://spectrum.chat/ (great potential)
Tried https://flarum.org/
Found https://www.mightynetworks.com/ and stayed there. Mighty Networks was free, but I upgraded. It's the best community building platform out there.
Here is the end result: https://hq.citizenhealth.io/
It would be great to understand why you abandoned Spectrum and Flarum?
Flarum was too new. While I liked it, I wasn't going to stake the future of a community on an open source project that was just getting started. For context, this was about 3 years ago.
Spectrum is awesome, but I wanted to map a subdomain to the installation. Since that wasn't possible with Spectrum, I went with Mighty Networks.
If you don’t mind paying the most powerful and my personal favourite is https://XenForo.com constant updates and an overall great product with a good community marketplace!
Discourse is the only one that I've found that I would feel comfortable using.
I would love to hear of other options.
A suggestion: start with reddit?
Yes, good suggestion.
I would, however, still like to know what good software options there are should I want to go down that route in the future...
A basic forum with replies, and replies to replies is a pretty simple recipe. That's how I'd roll it. You'll have 100% control with the freedom and flexibility to iterate without constraint. This assumes you're on Rails.
Topic
has_many :replies, class_name:'TopicReply', dependent: :destroy
TopicReply
belongs_to :topic
belongs_to :parent, class_name: 'TopicReply'
has_many :replies, class_name: 'TopicReply', foreign_key: :parent_id, dependent: :destroy
Surely vBulletin is up there?
I used Vanilla (https://vanillaforums.com/en/features/forums) a lonnnng time ago and was very pleased. Discourse looks cool as well. I had never heard of them before today...
https://discourse.org
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This looks great! Have you used this before?
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Hmm... I wonder which is better out of Flarum and Discourse?
I used Flarum when trying to get a community set up for my product (ended up abandoning it to revisit when we have a larger customer base). It worked fairly well and I enjoyed it but it's definitely beta and unless you're fairly tech savvy it's not quite worth the setup / maintenance. Lots of config changes, crashes, huge issues with plugins, and some features missing. I'd suggest looking more into Discourse or something heavier like MyBB - but as mentioned below, Reddit would be a really good choice, especially if your users are already on it.
This is pretty cool, will look into it, thanks Jerry!