Hi guys! I am considering of creating a new forum for a little fun, by hosting a current open-source forum software and making some changes and tweaks . An independent place on the Internet without any outside influence or interference.
I plan to make it a place similar to 4chan in its glory days, without all of the illegality of the forum, as well as without all of the chaos that 4chan known for.
The community would be like a mini Internet, where people can discuss about things, share stuffs and information. A place for everyone to talk about current events, or share their amazing stories and projects with everyone, or meet new friends (as some of the plans for the features of the community). The community would be tightly moderated (so the software needed to have moderation tools) too. It could even be an alternative to Reddit without karma ofc in the future (as an example of mass and usage example) but I only expect at most of 0.1% of Reddit size).
I am considering of self-hosting an open source forum for this project before moving onto my own platform . The forum needed to operate well on a shared hosting (PHP) through, as I am running it through a shared hosting environment, and have good abilities to expand with a larger user base . I also prefer a more modern design (through themes or the native software design itself).
I hope to hear from you guys recommendations in the comment section below on which open source forum software is the best for this. I am currently looking towards MyBB and Flarum too, but I would love to hear the input from everyone.
So when you sign up for a forum to ask a single question and then move on, rather than correctly infer you are not interested in the forum anymore, they start sending you low-value emails until you get tired enough of them to login and change the setting.
If you run a Discourse, please change the default setting. Don’t use lame growth hacking features to nudge people into participating in a community they don’t want to be a part of.
https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles
(I'm the developer)
- install Node.js, Redis and PostgreSQL
- start the Redis server
- start PostgreSQL, create a database and run structure.sql: https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles/blob/master/sql/st...
- get all the source code for the actual app (ie. the code from the comment castles repo)
- figure out all your environment variables (the ones I list in the README)
- now you can run the node app (you probably want to use pm2 if on Linux)
- then connect that running node app to the public internet (I use something random for the HTTP_PORT environment variable, like 3333, and then I Nginx reverse proxy that to port 80 on my domain name (I will try to get this Nginx code and post it here later))
- and then I run the let's encrypt certbot for https
AFAICR it's open source; I think there is (or at least used to be?) a link to the code on the front page. If not, get in touch with the author, Scott A. (username “Malraux”).
https://www.iwethey.org/
HTH!
Depends on what you mean by “this”. What, the forum itself? That should be pretty self-explanatory. IIRC you can read without being signed in, but to post, you need to register. Should be a link at least on some frontpage, or it's probably reachable from the “Log in” link on every forum page.
Or did you mean getting the source? I'm not sure. Could well be the links on the frontpage are wildly out of date; don't those SourceForge pages talk about Python or something? AFAICR, it's been written in Java for a couple of decades now... As I said, get in touch with Scott.
But of course it makes most sense to try it out first, to see if it's what you want.
https://invisioncommunity.com/
It's been around for decades, and allows your forum to be part of the real, open internet. Not locked behind some Discord or Facebook wall.
So you can self host but they'd rather make recurring revenue from you.
https://lobste.rs
Looks good, works on mobile, continuously updated.
Try it out.
Edit: Oh wow, downvoted for posting a good recommendation?
1: https://flarum.org/
But practically speaking, and unfortunately, hosted forums are a dead technology. All of the attention is on social media, Discord and federated solutions like Mastodon and Lemmy. If what you actually want to do is create a community rather than write software, you could consider existing solutions like that.