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17 Comments

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!

  1. 6

    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/

    1. 1

      It would be great to understand why you abandoned Spectrum and Flarum?

      1. 2

        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.

  2. 2

    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!

  3. 2

    Discourse is the only one that I've found that I would feel comfortable using.

    I would love to hear of other options.

  4. 2

    A suggestion: start with reddit?

    1. 1

      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...

  5. 1

    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

  6. 1

    Surely vBulletin is up there?

  7. 1

    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...

  8. 5

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      This looks great! Have you used this before?

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  9. 3

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

    1. 1

      Hmm... I wonder which is better out of Flarum and Discourse?

      1. 2

        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.

    2. 1

      This is pretty cool, will look into it, thanks Jerry!

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