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What are the best hosted forum platforms?
4
Options
Considered
10
User
Recs.
Feb 1, 2023
Last
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4
Options
Considered
Best hosted forum platforms
Price
Written in
Databases
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Discourse + Digital Ocean
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Vanilla
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PHP
MySQL
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DiscourseHosting
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PlushForums
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See Full List
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Discourse + Digital Ocean
My Rec
ommendation
for
Discourse + Digital Ocean
My Recommendation for
Discourse + Digital Ocean
All
7
Pros
6
Cons
1
Top
Pro
•••
Easy one-click upgrade
Discourse can upgrade itself with one click in the admin panel. Not the same can be said about MyBB, or most other forums.
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Top
Con
•••
No themes beyond changing colors
Discourse doesn't have a themes ecosystem. All you can do is change the colors.
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Top
Pro
•••
Discussions can be organized in categories and tagged
Discussions can be tagged with an arbitrary number of tags, separately from categories. Categories are hierarchical and don't scale; tags do.
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Top
Pro
•••
Advanced JavaScript app
Runs in modern browsers and works identically on desktop and tablet and smartphone without the need for a native app.
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Top
Pro
•••
Has a built-in immune system from trolls, spammers and bad actors
Discourse has a simple user trust system that makes moderating the forum a lot easier. Users gain more permissions as they gain more trust, which limits the amount of damage spammers and trolls can do. Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood also founded StackExchange, which is the gold standard for gamification/moderation systems so you can also expect Discourse to get better and better at moderation.
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Top
Pro
•••
Modern & polished UI/UX with lots of great smaller features
The best feature is its design: discourse is designed to aid in the creation of high quality online conversations. Flat discussions with well implemented quoting systems, expandable/collapsible replies, infinite scroll, clean UI and many more features come together to form a highly polished forum experience that makes legacy forums show their age.
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Top
Pro
•••
100% free and fully open source
Discourse is powered by Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, PostgreSQL and Redis. The code is licensed under GPL and available on GitHub.
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Recommend
2
--
Vanilla
My Rec
ommendation
for
Vanilla
My Recommendation for
Vanilla
All
12
Pros
8
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
•••
Discussions can be organized in categories and tagged
Discussions can be tagged with an arbitrary number of tags, separately from categories. Categories are hierarchical and don't scale; tags do.
See More
Top
Con
•••
Templating could be better
It is difficult to customise Vanilla in a way where it can be source controlled. This may be a benefit for communities who just want to get up and running, but is a drawback for developers.
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Specs
Written in:
PHP
Databases:
MySQL
Top
Pro
•••
Importer from many other forums
Vanilla Porter can import posts (comments), threads (discussions), users, categories, roles and passwords (hashed) from most other forum software: bbPress, Drupal, MyBB, NoteBB, phpBB, PunBB, SimpleMachines 1&2, Toast, UserVoice, vBulletin, Xenforo, YAF.NET and others. Some importers support avatars, attachments, signatures, and PMs. A few support tags and user notes. Imports aren't flawless, but they do most of the work.
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Top
Con
•••
No post edit history
Old versions of a post are only visible to admins, which may lead to a credibility problem. The amount of time during which users can edit their posts is configurable from a few minutes to indefinitely.
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Top
Pro
•••
Single sign on
Ability to sign in with another system to your forum.
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Top
Con
•••
Poor search
The default search that comes with Vanilla produces poor results because it uses MySQL.
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Top
Pro
•••
Hosted and self-hosted options
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Top
Pro
•••
Simple forum software
It is a lightweight Internet forum package that comes with embeddable forums and the ability to import from other forums.
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Top
Pro
•••
Free and open source
Vanilla is a free PHP+MySQL application that's licensed under GPLv2 with source code available on GitHub.
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Top
Pro
•••
Fast
PHP may not be the most modern language, but Vanilla is fast.
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Top
Pro
•••
Easy setup
Vanilla is a MySQL + PHP app and can be set up very easily.
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here
Recommend
3
1
--
DiscourseHosting
My Rec
ommendation
for
DiscourseHosting
My Recommendation for
DiscourseHosting
All
3
Pros
3
Top
Pro
•••
No tech skills needed to use
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Top
Pro
•••
Good support
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Top
Pro
•••
Starts at just U$20 per month
Cheap if you've got a community and care about discourse.
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Hide
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Get it
here
Recommend
2
--
PlushForums
My Rec
ommendation
for
PlushForums
My Recommendation for
PlushForums
Hide
Get it
here
Recommend
1
1
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