NEnetworked·Feb 6, 2023
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 k
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now how useful it really is.
I rejected NodeBB because MongoDB is no longer developed under a free license. I'll list some other forum software I have considered in case you find it useful: Fossil Forums (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki), nimforum (https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum), Talkyard (https://github.com/debiki/talkyard), Misago (https://github.com/rafalp/Misago), FlaskBB (https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb). All of these have less momentum behind them than Flarum. Most are lightweight. I found it very appropriate that nimforum's name is inconsistently capitalized. :-) I am still kind of amazed that Fossil has integrated a forum and a chatroom. During my research I also found an interesting fork of SMF: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte.