I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.
To be fair; I tried migrating a population from Invision Power Board (IPB) to Discourse over 10 years ago and it did not work.
The discourse software was sleek enough, speedy enough etc; but it was too far a disconnect from how forums of yore worked. Discourse is much better suited for QnA over Discussions where each comment has equal merit; there was also an emphasis on 'personality' with older forum technology which promoted some kitsch graphics design and made people cultivate a persona (which became a reason to put more effort into replies to things).
I'm not sure if I can correctly articulate what I mean, but, just be aware: Here may be dragons.
Open source Vanilla seems to not be doing well: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-.... It's a shame. I thought it had a nice UI: mobile-friendly, not very flashy, around 300K per page (less if assets are cached), rendered on the server. I wanted to migrate my FluxBB forum to Vanilla, since FluxBB is effectively discontinued in favor of Flarum. If I migrate my forum now, it will probably be to Flarum. https://www.unitedbsd.com/ runs it, and I seem to like the experience of browsing it more than Discourse forums (edit: but I still prefer paginated forums without infinite scrolling). It also helps that Flarum has lower system requirements than Discourse. The forum migration tool https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter targets both Vanilla and Flarum, though I haven't actually attempted a migration with it, so I don't know how useful it really is.
fwiw I've come to similar conclusions, though I think Discourse has higher potential. For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app. I'm doing some tests on a DigitalOcean instance and it doesn't seem that resource hungry so far.
The Flarum community seems much more friendly, DIY and open. Having to use PHP in 2023 is a little depressing, but it would presumably integrate more easily into other PHP projects like Wordpress.
I was hoping to use NodeBB for the pure js stack but it's missing some important features and the front end is greybearded out of using a modern framework because of "speed"[1]. You can use Postgres instead of Mongo, by the way:
> NodeBB Forum Software is powered by Node.js and supports either Redis, MongoDB, or a PostgreSQL database
> For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app.
Honestly, if I was going to pay for a forum, I'd probably go with (self-hosted) XenForo from the start. It has the most polished user experience of any forum software I have seen. I understand people sell custom mobile apps for it, too, though I haven't really looked.
I thought using NodeBB with PostgreSQL was not recommended for production. Looks like I was wrong. Thanks for telling me.
vBulletin got kinda killed by the Internet Brands buyout and vB4 and the vB5 upgrades. It still exists and you can still use it, but very few new sites do anymore.
