Running phpBB on some crappy shared hosting. Well, these days on some crappy VPS.

I'm being completely serious, but what is the current fav open source forum software these days? I'd love to host a forum for a small community I'm involved in. Not a stranger to hosting other things across a variety of stacks, so I'm not particular about technology used.

Every single forum I see now is using this:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.

I work at Discourse. As a regular user, if you want to prevent these new user badges (and notifications), head to /u/yourusername/preferences/interface and check "Skip new user onboarding tips and badges".

It is in our plans to eventually rework how this new user education and notification system works, and I suppose eventually with https://id.discourse.com/ the intent would be that your preferences follow you to every Discourse site you sign up for, so you could just set it once.

As an admin, badges can be disabled entirely, or individually.

I just wish that the whole badges thing was off by default. It's a forced gamification that's just annoying and doesn't really teach anything.

Except for that, I love Discourse.

It's their way of attempting to fight user churn. Forums need all the help they can get in that regard given the attention economy of today and the giants they're attempting to fight against. Anything novel is a win.

You are just being extremely nitpicky.

Discourse is awful software, from a user standpoint.

But its better than all the other forum software I've seen...

Thanks, I'll have to look into it too, though the gamification sounds annoying AF.

I responded to the other comment, but I work at Discourse. As a site admin you can disable badges (which is our gamification system) entirely, or you can get rid of individual badges.

If you're interested in trying Discourse, our lowest hosting plan is $20/month, or if you want to self-host there have been a bunch of improvements in the setup process recently, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-discourse-just-got...

I hate the scrollbar hijacking and lazy loading on larger threads.

I just want pagination and to use my stock browser features...

You could take a look at https://nodebb.org/

Thanks, I'll check it out :)

At least this would make FAQs and other important bits of information available to non-users and search engines.

Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(

Jokes aside, I've played around with Campfire and it's very, very simple, but pretty nice to use and easy to set up: https://once.com/campfire

> Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(

There's an actively developed open source server that allows the clients to connect!

https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server

I wish Smarter Child was still around so we could see how LLMs interact with it.

I got you: https://github.com/mk6i/smarter-smarter-child

Seconding campfire. Straightforward, easy to host, easy to backup, no monetization strategy. Most self-hosted alternatives have complicated deployments to enable scaling to >1,000s of users which I will never, ever need.

IRC never died.

The only viable option, of course: https://escargot.chat/

Is this open source? Would be cool to self host this..

People talking about moving to Revolt. It's the most similar

Yeah Stoat is the closest, but no video calling still. But that's in the pipeline at least

Time to spin up a mumble server again...

TeamSpeak and Ventrillo still work great. It was a monumental mistake to switch to these 3rd party services that are bugged by every intelligence apparatus on earth.

That would be great if your community only exists in a voip channel

I had a look at Teamspeak but you need to email somebody for permission to have more than 32 users on your server.

I gave up running my TS3 servers (after nearly a decade) because they added a trialware system that required getting approval/serial code from the company every month to continue operating. They were squeezing everyone on TS3 trying to force them to TS4/5/etc. Have they stopped this or walked it back?

And to be clear, Teamspeak from version 5 on is not teamspeak. It's matrix with a skin. Not that that's terrible, but it's not great for running it on low power/cost VPS like actual teamspeak was.

Could use mumble instead?

Those are voice chat, yeah? Discord has chat too, which is used more than voice in many of my communities.

our groups are discussing [stoat](https://stoat.chat/).

I don't know it well yet.

.......yet.