The only other contender that matched my vision for a revival of a more traditional style forum was phpBB and I don’t think it would have been up to scratch for the eagle eyed and fairly demanding tech community.
Discourse, Flarum, Vanilla are all great options but I don’t think they were well suited to what I wanted to build. Not enough to set them apart from other communities in this space.
Building a bespoke solution wasn’t an option when time commitments and budget are considered.
The data is all well portable and neatly organised so if those needs change and can be reconsidered as we grow what is the best decision.
That sounds interesting to me. Was looking different, a goal in itself? (if I interpret you correctly?)
(Interesting that going back to the "old style" forums, is the way to look different, nowadays :- ))
Flarum is not at v1 yet and isn't really recommended for production. It's also quite feature light and I would be hesitant to expand upon it while it's not stable yet.
I've never seen a Discourse forum that doesn't look like another Discourse forum, have you? They all look the same! I had a pre-launch landing page up where something like 75% was on desktop. Discourse seems to have a mobile first, desktop never approach to its design and appears to be difficult to customise. I felt it was a sub-optimal experience suited better to communities centered around a single topic or perhaps support.
Vanilla is the most mature of these new style options but just wasn't doing it for me.
I don't think going a bit "retro" is a bad thing. I thought XenForo had a great balance between retaining that classic, nostalgic, familiar vibe while still providing lots of nice QoL features to go with it.