from Hacker News

Flarum – Simple forum software for building great communities

by maydemir on 6/6/22, 9:00 AM with 56 comments

  • by longrod on 6/9/22, 9:35 AM

    I think what changed over the years in the "product discussions" space/is that the sentiment has shifted from "users will come to us" to "we must go to our users". Platforms like Twitter (surprising as it is), Discord, Reddit etc. where a user already is dissuades a lot of products from hosting their own forums.

    It's just quicker for a user to join a Discord community or tweet/DM a question where they already have an account. Even with things like OAuth2, the mental burden of creating a new account is there. Not to mention learning how to use the new platform. And the total gain after all the effort is trivial.

    I think at this point in time, it's not reasonable to ask users to sign up to your own private platform unless you have a huge and loyal following. Users have become lazy due to the abundance of alternatives.

    When I get an issue/bug/question, the first thing I check is if they have an issue tracker. Preferably GitHub. After that comes their various social accounts; Discord, Twitter, Reddit etc. If none of those work out I would most probably ditch the software. Reaching out via custom channels is cumbersome.

    With that being said, this looks really cool although "delightfully simple" won't be an objective feeling among your users. Good job none the less! I wish you the best.

  • by marginalia_nu on 6/9/22, 11:42 AM

    The Hard Problem of forum software is how to prevent spam bots and drive-by exploits. It's what killed the previous generation of forums. Reddit usually gets the blame, but that is only true in that they had the economies of scale to survive the increasingly hostile internet ecosystem.

    I'm curious how Flarum approaches this.

  • by Gentil on 6/9/22, 2:23 PM

    About time Flarum is noticed! I have been using Flarum through unitedbsd.com. It's nice and snappy. Might be a lil too modern for some communities. Especially OSS ones. But is fine IMO.

    My problem with discourse has been that Firefox shows FB tracker warning in irregular intervals on the top-left corner. It's says FB tracker. It makes me uneasy. But somehow it is the standard for all OSS communities.

  • by Atomskun on 6/9/22, 8:35 AM

    Can I scroll up to a thread to the first message without Javascript running to fetch previous posts? We had this in the 00-ties.

    It would also be great if I can Ctrl+F to use my browser's search feature to look through all messages instead of relying on a dynamic JavaScript one.

  • by pelagicAustral on 6/9/22, 11:37 AM

    Still more of a fan of the ol' SMF, vBulletin, IPB, phpbb style forums. Probably just nostalgia.

  • by Brajeshwar on 6/9/22, 8:10 AM

    Found Flarum on PikaPods for those who wants to try hosting it without the self-hosting hassle. I have been playing around with PikaPods for a while.

    https://www.pikapods.com/apps#communication

  • by cies on 6/9/22, 9:54 AM

    Looks nice. Though my mindshare goes to Lemmy at this point. It's slightly different, but a fediverse project and pretty feature compete at this point:

    https://join-lemmy.org/

  • by marban on 6/9/22, 6:19 AM

    Discord should have never escaped the gaming realm.

  • by itsjloh on 6/9/22, 6:41 AM

    I've seen quite a few Flarum forums pop up recently. I wonder how it stacks up against Discourse in resource requirements? Discourse isn't a lightweight app (not a criticism, just an observation).

  • by productceo on 6/9/22, 11:49 AM

    Why do entrepreneurs NOT use ready-made forum softwares like this to start startups? Clever use of general tools like this (maybe not specifically Flarum) can help them launch communities or marketplaces in less than a day. Is it as optimal as a in-house built forum? No. Should they be saving time on reinventing the undifferentiated code part so that they can test the core business concept and build out their differentiated networks of users? Yes.

  • by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 6/9/22, 12:03 PM

    > To run Flarum, you will need:

    * Apache (with mod_rewrite enabled) or Nginx

    * PHP 7.3+ with the following extensions: curl, dom, fileinfo, gd, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo_mysql, tokenizer, zip MySQL 5.6+/8.0.23+ or MariaDB 10.0.5+

    * SSH (command-line) access to run Composer

    Unfortunately the dependencies are not as simple as I hoped (other than SSH). Are there single binary forum software (perhaps written in Go/Rust) that use SQLite, that people have experience with?

    I guess I am looking for the Caddy of forum software.

  • by blahyawnblah on 6/9/22, 7:27 AM

    Would be more viable if they had a file upload/download module that didn't allocate a files worth of space per download per user. The FoF module is not usable.

  • by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn on 6/9/22, 10:12 AM

    Aren't "great communities" a function of people rather than software?

  • by synergy20 on 6/9/22, 3:22 PM

    Did not realize Flarum reached 1.0 sometime ago.

    can the replies be configured contained in the related thread that is indented too for easy reading? I found put all discussions and replies at the same level is hard to follow.

  • by edward on 6/9/22, 11:09 AM

    I fixed a spelling mistake: https://github.com/flarum/flarum/pull/81

  • by revskill on 6/9/22, 7:05 AM

    I'm sorry, but i failed to install php or composer many times before in Windows.

    Installing PHP in Windows is harder than building a production-level enterprise application in Typescript, sadly but it happened to me.

    Good job, PHP.

  • by keb_ on 6/9/22, 2:32 PM

    Flarum is a sizable open source application that uses Mithril.js as the front-end framework. Flarum devs: I'm wondering, how well did Mithril scale and are you happy with the choice?