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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Check out Discourse, which is a proper, modern forum and a way better experience.

Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO, https://flarum.org/

It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.

Is composer a problem for shared hosts?

Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on your local machine to install the dependencies and then copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.

I never thought of doing like you said. I've tried composer in a few shared, and it's been a hit or miss.

I've started doing my composer installs offline when I foolishly tried to deploy a decently sized PHP project to a VPS with "only" 2GiB of RAM. For some obscure reason Composer eats RAM like it's cake and I couldn't get it to complete fast enough on the server itself.

Composer on shared hosts is a challenge, mostly involving retrying until it works. That's why I fetch most dependencies locally. Sometimes I mess with the dependencies a bit when a specific dependency requires information about how the operating system is configured, but most of the time that's not necessary.

aaand it costs $100/mo vs Discord being free and everyone who joins needs to create new account per instance

You can get it cheaper if you self-host, but it still requires a VPS, which, on average, costs more than most are going to want to pay to host a forum.

And with VPS you have to maintain the actual server. You can't just install it and be done. If you aren't already familiar with setting up servers, handling access, setting up software, and setting up DNS it will take you evening or two just to get going and after that it requires you continuous maintenance and how many of these custom forums actually have backups in case something goes wrong?

discourse is open source, you can put it on a raspberry pi

Then you have to pay for a domain name (which granted is cheap), setup something to handle your IP changes, install and maintain the pi itself and hope there aren't any vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain a foothold in your home network, which means segragating it behind a VLAN which your ISP router probably doesn't support so you need to buy a router then of course you need to buy the pi it self and an SD card and powersuply since the normal micro-USB doesn't provice enough juice, but then again you didn't know that when you started. Then you probably want to buy a case for it so you don't just store a naked PCB on a shelve/floor. Then of course you need to setup the software and learn how it works and keep it up to day forever.

Or you can just spin another Discord "server" which you already know how to do and not have to worry about hosting anything.

Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or do anything with the data.

TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.

I know how to run pi, but that doesn't mean it makes sense for everyone else or even most of the people. Say you have some open source project and there is a need to have some form of communication. You can either jump through the hoops to host your own forum that you need to host and monitor. Now you are spending time you could be using to work on your project on sysadmin stuff. So either you pay for it, which feels bad when there is free alternatives available which will do the job just as well with only lacking some discoverability in form of text search, but you can redemy that by making a sticky comment where you have FAQ or whatever you need.

Evne with digital ocean you still need to worry your server and keep it up to date which again takes time out of your actual project.

I don't see what problems you people see with Discord. Yeah you can't take all of the conversation data with you, but is that really what you would even want? I don't know what kind of projects you are running where forum is so much superior to discord.

a project other people use? they can google answers or use forum search… I’m not at their beck and call to answer questions in chat

different people will like different things, but chat is transient

an hour a month on server maintenance isn’t going to make or break anyone’s project, but if you don’t like tinkering with things there’s nothing wrong with that

>a project other people use? they can google answers or use forum search

can you give example?

not mine, but forums I frequent:

https://users.rust-lang.org/ https://discuss.emberjs.com/ https://github.community/

but what makes the format better other than you dont like discord?

search, permanence

Again please give examples. Everyone says that searching is better which obviously it is, but what the hell are you all searching from these forums?

This is the incessant cycle I've been seeing a lot of for the past ten years:

1. Depend on proprietary service that silos data

2. Service changes price or shuts down or does something unpopular

3. People migrate to a new product baiting people with a free offering

4. Go to 1

We never should have left self-hosted bulletin boards and IRC. Hosting is cheaper and better than ever.

the free cycle is the worst, vc money screws over a lot of people that could just be running traditional businesses - there are good institutional shake ups as a result sometimes, but then the new players ultimately become what they sought to disrupt

and bulleting boards get corked on weekly basis.

why is a forum so much better than a chat and FAQ? I really can't see the problem you guys are trying to fix here.

You can host it for free if you set it up yourself, on your own server.

Please read the other comment threads that discuss this very thing

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