Ask HN: Is there a new and interesting open source forum library?

14 points·el_dev_hell··7 comments

There was php BB in the early 2000s, which still seems to be active (but very dated).

Discourse is nice, but it's certainly in the stable phase now.

Is there anything new/interesting happening in the open source forum software space?

I'm mostly asking out of general curiosity to see what's breaking new ground.

Since 2018 the distributed version control system Fossil has a forum built into it. The forum content is cloned with the repository just like the code and the issues. Fossil's own forum serves as a demo: https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forummain.

Unfortunately independent forums have more or less died thanks to social media. Even most new forums seem to be offered strictly as services rather than hostable code.

It's not new but if you want to dig into Arc Lisp you might consider contributing to or forking Anarki[0], the public fork of the software running HN.

[0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki

That does seem to be the case, unfortunately.

I will check out Anarki.

Not sure if it meets your "interesting" criteria but I like https://flarum.org

Talkyard (written in Scala) https://github.com/debiki/talkyard

Misago (Django based) https://github.com/rafalp/Misago/

Talkyard is exactly the kind of project I hoped existed.

Thanks!

I remeber Vanilla being quite nice. MyBB is much lighter than phpBB and can also use sqlite.

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