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Comment by weiming | Hacker News Reader

What percent of the cost is spent on EC2 instances? Curious how much that can be reduced by using something more "lightweight" like Elixir or even Node. Basically, not needing to spin up thousands of OS processes. (Discourse uses Ruby.)

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Thread hijack, asking for a friend.. What's the state of forum software these days? Some friends want to move their private/closed forum off vbulletin, which apparently hasn't kept up with the times (in particular, mobile use is apparently painful). Is discourse the best way these days, or is there something more lightweight e.g with elixir as mentioned but still reasonably mature and full featured?

A lot of vB forums switched to XenForo which is where the vB devs went after vbulletin was bought out. It has a more classic feel than Discourse which may be an advantage if your userbase is coming from vB, but it is definitely well made and up to date with modern technology.

I heard mybb is probably the most up to date with php7 support too. Discourse is nice, except that I don't want to pull in a whole Ruby framework, same for nodebb(using nodejs) which is nice too. In short, give mybb a try.

Official recommended way of running Discourse is with docker, there is no pulling in various packages but really just a 10 min thing if you already have docker.

The only problem with that point of view is that with containerizing it, and saying, oh you don't have to bring in Ruby, just use Docker, is that you are almost black-boxing it in a way.

The user does hardly any config, really has no idea how it works, which could make diagnosing and troubleshooting issues that crop up problematic.

The exact reason to use container is so that individual deployment doesn't get that random problem you're trying to bring up. If container deployments have problems, you take it to the upstream because it will likely to be affecting many.

XenForo seems to be the popular choice at the moment, though IPB may be catching up a bit. Both are a lot more traditional than the likes of Discourse, but they're the scripts many vBulletin owners migrated to when Internet Brands basically killed the company, as well as the ones with the most mods/community support.

Not sure about the state of open source forum scripts, though I don't recall phpBB/SMF/MyBB being replaced by anything else in that market recently.

But personally, I'd recommend XenForo. It's what most of the sites I run use (see Wario Forums for an example), and it's what many sites I'm a member/volunteer on use too (like The Admin Zone or Gaming Latest). Lots of choices for themes and mods there, it's pretty fully featured as far as basic options are concerned and the media gallery/resource manager work well too.

The fact many members weren't too keen on the other solutions I suggested helped too.

But yeah, XenForo is my recommendation.

Another vote for XenForo, my previous employer ran several forums all using vBulletin. IMO the direction of vBulletin 5 was a big miss, and like other commenters have said, the core product manager/developer of vBulletin 3 & 4 left to start XenForo. There was some significant legal drama with the current owner of vBulletin suing XenForo for infringement & theft intellectual property. Those all have been dismissed in favor of XenForo (all from memory, probably worthwhile to search this out just in case).

I've seen some enthusiasm around Discourse but for users who are used to the look & feel of a traditional discussion forum or the workflow of vBulletin, it can be very jarring. I believe there was a decent community split when Ubuntu tried to retire their legacy vBulletin forum in favor of Discourse; I think they are still running both side by side with almost different groups using them. XenForo is a more natural progression from vBulletin and would be my platform of choice.

Discourse looks different from the traditional style but to my surprise I got used to using it quite fast and liking it much and not just about the usability but with its API, customizability, administration capability and mobile support. It shows when someone has experience creating stackoverflow.

Maybe then you'd be interested in having a look at Talkyard, which is new forum software (I'm developing it). It has HackerNews type discussions, with improvements:

https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...

and looks & works a bit like Discourse, + also Slack chat features (no mobile app though) and StackOverflow style question-answers. Open source.

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