Looking for the best forum software to start a new forum community in 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Looking for the best forum software to start a new forum community in 2025

27 pointsJsttan43 comments

Reddit Post

Hi guys! I am considering of creating a new forum for a little fun, by hosting a current open-source forum software and making some changes and tweaks . An independent place on the Internet without any outside influence or interference.

I plan to make it a place similar to 4chan in its glory days, without all of the illegality of the forum, as well as without all of the chaos that 4chan known for.

The community would be like a mini Internet, where people can discuss about things, share stuffs and information. A place for everyone to talk about current events, or share their amazing stories and projects with everyone, or meet new friends (as some of the plans for the features of the community). The community would be tightly moderated (so the software needed to have moderation tools) too. It could even be an alternative to Reddit without karma ofc in the future (as an example of mass and usage example) but I only expect at most of 0.1% of Reddit size).

I am considering of self-hosting an open source forum for this project before moving onto my own platform . The forum needed to operate well on a shared hosting (PHP) through, as I am running it through a shared hosting environment, and have good abilities to expand with a larger user base . I also prefer a more modern design (through themes or the native software design itself).

I hope to hear from you guys recommendations in the comment section below on which open source forum software is the best for this. I am currently looking towards MyBB and Flarum too, but I would love to hear the input from everyone.

Discourse may be worth considering https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

seconded. I love forums that use this. Easy to spin up as well.

I agreed. But I plan to run this forum on a shared hosting through, and I don't think it is possible.

Discourse can be self-hosted as well

Shared hosting usually doesn't have docker or a vm available to you. Often you get to upload PHP, maybe Node, Ruby or Pyhon too and accept all their opinionated defaults. Often this makes it incompatiable with anything not specifically designed for shared hosting.

Discourse is great software with one dark pattern that I absolutely loathe: by default, it turns on an obnoxious setting to send you digest emails when you stop visiting a forum.

So when you sign up for a forum to ask a single question and then move on, rather than correctly infer you are not interested in the forum anymore, they start sending you low-value emails until you get tired enough of them to login and change the setting.

If you run a Discourse, please change the default setting. Don’t use lame growth hacking features to nudge people into participating in a community they don’t want to be a part of.

Comment castles:

https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles

(I'm the developer)

Do you have any suggestions on deploying? I looked over the readme. I’m not understanding how to go from clone to cloud. Meetup sucks and I’m wondering if this might be a good replacement for local groups.

Yeah, here is what you need to do:

- install Node.js, Redis and PostgreSQL

- start the Redis server

- start PostgreSQL, create a database and run structure.sql: https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles/blob/master/sql/st...

- get all the source code for the actual app (ie. the code from the comment castles repo)

- figure out all your environment variables (the ones I list in the README)

- now you can run the node app (you probably want to use pm2 if on Linux)

- then connect that running node app to the public internet (I use something random for the HTTP_PORT environment variable, like 3333, and then I Nginx reverse proxy that to port 80 on my domain name (I will try to get this Nginx code and post it here later))

- and then I run the let's encrypt certbot for https

Thanks! I’ll check it out

This is quite interesting, but just curious if this is under development, as I notice the UI is not that great through?

Flarum is great, but myBB is a clasic forum with a lot of option that will work on any shared hosting.

I agreed. Thanks for your feedback.

IWeThey is among the best, probably the best, Web forums I know. It has one killer feature that HN sorely lacks: It shows edit history, edited posts have a link to show all previous versions.

AFAICR it's open source; I think there is (or at least used to be?) a link to the code on the front page. If not, get in touch with the author, Scott A. (username “Malraux”).

https://www.iwethey.org/

HTH!

Tbh, how does this work through? Their website provide almost no information at all through.

> Tbh, how does this work through?

Depends on what you mean by “this”. What, the forum itself? That should be pretty self-explanatory. IIRC you can read without being signed in, but to post, you need to register. Should be a link at least on some frontpage, or it's probably reachable from the “Log in” link on every forum page.

Or did you mean getting the source? I'm not sure. Could well be the links on the frontpage are wildly out of date; don't those SourceForge pages talk about Python or something? AFAICR, it's been written in Java for a couple of decades now... As I said, get in touch with Scott.

But of course it makes most sense to try it out first, to see if it's what you want.

For shared hosting I guess Flarum would be the best choice. However, if you want to go with more advanced you can use Discourse but it does not work with shared hosting

Hi! Thanks for your comment. I strongly appreciate this, and would take into consideration.

Hi guys. I just noticed that this post has a Reddit post on the front text. I originally made this post for Reddit actually, but I taught of hearing feedback here too, so I cross-posted it here. I forgot that the title of the text which is 'Reddit post' is also copied. If you guys have any recommendations or feedback for me, I would love to hear it. I sincerely apologise.

InVision lets you self-host when you're small, then move to its cloud when you grow:

https://invisioncommunity.com/

It's been around for decades, and allows your forum to be part of the real, open internet. Not locked behind some Discord or Facebook wall.

Just curious, I has noticed that it is only possible to host it on their cloud, and doesn't have any autonomy to host the forum myself?

A link to this page is buried (nearly hidden) under all of their monthly cloud plans: https://invisioncommunity.com/buy/self-hosted/

So you can self host but they'd rather make recurring revenue from you.

https://codeberg.org/Postmill/Postmill

Just curious, are there a demo somewhere?

https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb

Hmm, 502 on their official forum: https://forums.flaskbb.org/

Same here.

https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

https://lobste.rs

This is quite interesting, and it feel like Hacker News too. That is cool. Work take that into consideration. Thanks.

Why not set up your own lemmy instance?

Is it possible to host Lemmy on a shared hosting? If possible, would love to check it out as I always interested in federated communities.

I've never hosted myself, but why not head over there and ask!

True. Will do now.

I’m rolling my own using Laravel as they are all hard to integrate into a wider project.

XenForo but it's not free

I heard of XenForo, but unfortunately it is very expensive to me. Thanks for suggesting by the way.

Flarum is great [1].

Looks good, works on mobile, continuously updated.

Try it out.

Edit: Oh wow, downvoted for posting a good recommendation?

1: https://flarum.org/

I agreed (but I posted here to get some feedback). But I don't think it is continuously updated, as I noticed their update progress is quite slow through.

I mean the obvious answer, given that this is HN, is that you should make it yourself. A basic text forum in PHP wouldn't be super difficult.

But practically speaking, and unfortunately, hosted forums are a dead technology. All of the attention is on social media, Discord and federated solutions like Mastodon and Lemmy. If what you actually want to do is create a community rather than write software, you could consider existing solutions like that.

Hi! Thanks for your comment. I also plan to create one myself, but I plan to deploy an existing forum software first, before moving on my own software. I want to use a hosted forums as it is easier to moderate, as well as hosted forum can give us some autonomy, without at the hands of big social media like Discord and Reddit, and we could made it to the benefit of the community based on what the community want.

Why not use an existing software?

Well making my own software would let me create my own features that I need, understand the codebase better and etc, and possibility create features that other software do not supported at the moment.

As someone who makes his money from hosting “forums”, I can NOT confirm that forums are dead. Maybe the classical ones, but not places like HN, where the content is interesting and peoples opinions are appreciated.

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