forem

I guess this is as good a time as any to mention that something like that exists (and to toot our team's work over the years): I started the project years ago and in the last few have gotten really great support from glebm and some others to get it to the point where it's a really lovely, stable, and fast piece of work. We consider it the best Ruby/Rails-based alternative to Discourse out there (as an aside - wewere honored that Ryan Bigg would point people our way when he stopped maintaining Forem[1]) You said: √ I would like to see forum software that has the feel of classic forum software (like Flux) √ not in PHP √ that is server-rendered √ with a very minimal default theme (no animation) √ and minimal JavaScript √ and that has many of the modern features of Discourse. I think those check out. In any case I sugg

This is why I prefer https://github.com/radar/forem by the "Ruby hero" Ryan Bigg. It's also for Rails but without the bells and whistles from Discourse. A.k.a. "The best Rails forum engine. Ever.", it's perfect if you want to build something unique from the ground up.

One thing that I'd love to see is more high quality forums as pluggable components instead of being / as well as being standalone apps. For Rails specifically, we're using Forem over at Miniand which plugs in as a Rails engine and shares the same user accounts with the rest of the site via Devise. A lot of people who sign up to our forums end up converting into sales, and I believe that part of the reason is the seamless integration via the single account. Our wiki is also an engine, and also uses the same accounts, and having it all under one account system has been very much an eye opening experience. https://github.com/radar/forem https://www.miniand.com/forums