

Ask HN: Recommend customer-facing forum software / SaaS for startup. - BadassFractal

Hey guys. I&#x27;d like to host a forum for our users to be able to chat with each other, propose new features, help each other if they&#x27;re having issues, sticky a few posts here and there as FAQs for them to reference. We&#x27;re getting a lot of customer support requests these days and they&#x27;re too many to handle for a team of two, so we&#x27;re better off addressing them passively through FAQs and self-serve a la Google.<p>I&#x27;m thinking I&#x27;d either host this myself or I&#x27;d pay a SaaS service to do this for me. The latter is preferable, since setting up configuration management to deploy and backup the forum is a pain in the ass I&#x27;d rather delegate to someone else for a few bucks a month.<p>Some candidates I&#x27;m thinking of:<p>Google Groups - nice, but no way to sticky anything
UserVoice - not quite a forum unfortunately, mostly a direct communication channel with the company.
A subreddit - I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m totally comfortable relying on an external service (that I&#x27;m not paying for and thus might be down for random periods of time).
Discourse?
Disqus?<p>Anything you guys would recommend that worked very well for you?
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lubos
Use Discourse, I'm using it for my own startup and it has basically eliminated
email support.

I used UserVoice previously and it didn't work for me. The problem with
UserVoice is that it is basically beautiful repository of feature requests -
that is everything what is wrong with your software. This is not what you want
your users to be exposed to.

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amac
phpBB is free but self-host obviously. VanillaForums is a decent hosted
option.

