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Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

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It’s called Discourse and it’s really great

I don't know what it is about Discourse, but I can never get into it. Maybe it's the UI? It feels like a disorganized mess to me.

https://flarum.org/hosting

discourse has a few commercial hosting platforms. communiteq is one i’ve used.

I use communiteq for my website’s hosted forum and am happy with them.

Isn't that just Reddit?

No, on reddit you are subjected to the reddit administrators their policies. You have no real control. The user interface is also awful if you're interested in content older than a day.

And the voting system builds toxicity for smaller user numbers than should otherwise be needed.

It's not that different from Discord; unless you run the platform, there's always the risk of deplatforming.

Mostly, yes. Particularly in the terms of "Discord-difying forums". But you cannot have multiple subforums for your community on Reddit (unless you do something weird with subsubreddits, but those won't be clearly visible). Discord allows you to have several channels. Additionally, I'd like an alternative that isn't threaded like Reddit and HN. Threaded communities have their place, but classic chronological topics also do.

Circle?

If you're looking for the same sort of walled-garden corporate-degen vibe, try reddit? They even have nested conversations, like on Hacker News! /s

But seriously, Discourse is good forum software. You can self-host it or pay for a hosted instance. An example instance is IRLO, https://internals.rust-lang.org

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