We had looked at a bunch of forums from the traditional forums like MyBB, PhpBB, Flux BB to newer takes on forums like Vanilla, Discourse, Nodebb and Esotalk an year ago.
I liked the minimalism of Esotalk but it was being phased out in favour of developing Flarum. I found Vanilla was somehow missing the typical community feel of forums though lowendtalk is using it and is one of the busier communities.
Discourse was Ruby and extremely difficult to install and we did manage eventually but I always felt you need to be comfortable with Ruby or have managed hosting with Discourse. It's a handful.
Flux BB was one of the fastest of the traditional forums then. Arch Linux uses Flux BB and its a busy forum. It will be interesting to see which way they go now that it is going to be Flarum. I remember seeing some heated discussions in the Fluxbb forums about the shift.
We just added a flarum container in the Flockport app store [1] for those who want to give it a quick spin. It will work with LXC and most likely Nspawn too for those who have a recent versions of Systemd.
Phorum powered MySQL:s own (very large-scale) forum (does it still?) among other things, and in a way it seems to share a lot of the light-weightedness with some of the more modern ones in this thread.
I liked the minimalism of Esotalk but it was being phased out in favour of developing Flarum. I found Vanilla was somehow missing the typical community feel of forums though lowendtalk is using it and is one of the busier communities.
Discourse was Ruby and extremely difficult to install and we did manage eventually but I always felt you need to be comfortable with Ruby or have managed hosting with Discourse. It's a handful.
Flux BB was one of the fastest of the traditional forums then. Arch Linux uses Flux BB and its a busy forum. It will be interesting to see which way they go now that it is going to be Flarum. I remember seeing some heated discussions in the Fluxbb forums about the shift.
We just added a flarum container in the Flockport app store [1] for those who want to give it a quick spin. It will work with LXC and most likely Nspawn too for those who have a recent versions of Systemd.
https://www.flockport.com/store