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Insalgo

Any recommendations for a free engineering community forum?

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https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere.

They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.

> Managed forum hosting from $50/month

Yeowch. $50/mo is a huge cost for anything that's not making money.

I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered.

Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.

I wonder if there's anything wrong on your end. Clicked on your link, searched for a topic with lots of replies and the content loaded instantly. Then I proceeded to spam-click on topics and still everything loaded instantly...

MacBook M3 Pro with Firefox.

Measure the initial load time, subsequent loads are indeed faster

And to test many replies you actually have to see them since they're not loaded on page load, only when you get to the bottom of that page, so just opening the top doesn't test anything re. lots of replies

I think it’s a server side cache thing. I was loading a specific old topic on that instance and it took very long to load, but once loaded in the first time refreshes were decently fast (even in private windows). I’ve observed the same behaviour on the Figma forums, which are also discourse.

> which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist

You can host it yourself for much less than $50/mo, some people run small instances on a raspberry pi (I work for Discourse)

Discourse works without javascript. AFAIK it even has email support as well (I don't know how that works).

It barely works without JS. Essentially everything other than basic text display is broken, including search, pagination, sorting, etc. that said, I am surprised it works at all given the aforementioned loading throbber before you can see a page.

I stand corrected, their demo page is broken without javascript, for example you can't login and post.

Pagination works fine tho, for their demo page at least. An example long thread, [1] has a clickable link to [1]?page=2 at the bottom of the page.

But you can't post. If you log in (using javascript) it refuses to show you anything without javascript later, and you can't post a new message.

It's clearly not their priority, and I am not sure why.

[1] https://try.discourse.org/t/is-the-second-amendment-still-re...

Discourse is nice but only orga making money can use it

$50/month for the basic hosted option. Self-hosting requires skills and resources not available to everyone. It's very easy (and free) to start on Discord. Then if it takes off, there is too much friction to move to Discourse.

Discourse seems great until it isn't. E.g. sticks on a unremovable banner obscuring your content.

I haven't self-hosted any, but I enjoy using Flarum [0] forums. They load faster than Discourse ones and feel snappy.

[0]: https://flarum.org/

https://github.com/flarum/flarum (PHP) https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB (js)

phpBB

that's the one without per-post reactions and a weird markup language builtin?

I think of it as the one that powered 10+ years of accessible forum posts.

And unfortunately hadn't evolved in those many years to be a good alternative for this year

SimpleMachineForum

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