Looking for super lightweight forum solutions
I'm working on a project right now where I'm wanting to integrate a similar forum to what csallen has done here at IndieHackers. Other than building one from the ground up myself, I was wondering if anyone knows of more "pluggable" solutions. I'm aware of Telescope/Vulcan.
My stack is Django + VueJS. Thanks for any help in advance.
@csallen why did you build this forum from scratch instead of use another solution?
Just go with http://www.discourse.org/.
For one of my projects I used to run a super light-weight forum that I wrote myself (http://forums.fofou.org/sumatrapdf).
It worked great for a couple of years but increase in (human-generated) spam made me look for an alternative because writing my forum was fun when it was simple, adding decent spam detection is just too much work.
I surveyed available options and ended up with discourse (my instance: https://forum.sumatrapdfreader.org/).
I self-host it on $40/month Digital Ocean. Spent few hours setting it up. You can customize it to blend-in with your overall site by editing a bit of css and html via their settings interface.
They did a really great job and have many things that would take years to re-implement.
Business-wise, it's just not rational to spend a lot of time developing your own forum when it's not your primary business.
Even a simple forum that I wrote many years ago took many, many hours and I did it mostly because I used it as a concrete project to learn a new programming language.
If you're serious about being a businessman, don't waste your time implementing 5% of discourse. Spend that time improving your project, your marketing, your SEO, your website.
I'm probably the only person who doesn't like discourse at all. It feels messy and uninviting. Like the designer gave up halfway through.
I like the idea of discourse, but find the design super hard to use.
This makes me wonder why @csallen decided to build one from scratch. I've seen him answer it once but forgot and couldn't find it later.
If you're put off by the overbearing-ness of Discourse, have a look at Muut. They do an amazing job at keeping things simple. Not sure about a voting feature a la this forum, though.
Muut looks neat! Thanks for sharing.
I am interested in this too. I would like a forum that I can integrate to my main domain and that is integrated to my stack, rather than running an entirely different software product on a sub domain. I haven't found any solutions. Maybe this a good product idea? Forum as an API?
Discourse? http://www.discourse.org/
easy to use.
Example: https://wanqu.io/ (not my website)
Similar to indiehackers, we build our forum, https://missstart.com/forum/forum , from scratch with Meteor.
We build our own forum because we need it to have tight integration with other parts of our site, and we can reuse the same template as comments section for other parts of our site easily.