
Show HN: Flarum – Delightfully simple open-source forum software - tobyzerner
http://flarum.org
======
dpark
Bugs/feedback welcome, I assume?

1\. Bug: The "read the rules" banner link is broken.
[http://discuss.flarum.org/d/392/frequently-asked-
questions-p...](http://discuss.flarum.org/d/392/frequently-asked-questions-
please-read-here-before-posting/1)

2\. Bug: Long titles overlap with tags.
[http://imgur.com/jFGRHtC](http://imgur.com/jFGRHtC) This is on Chrome 44.0,
Windows 10.

3\. Feedback: The Title/Tag banner at the top of every post seems too large.
141px tall and no way to dismiss/shrink. This is especially noticeable given
the bold banner colors. It's very attractive, but I keep looking for the
dismiss button.

4\. Bug(?): Over quota error in pusher.min.js.
[http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq](http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq)

5\. Bug: Avatar 404s. [http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq](http://imgur.com/xmXPLaq)
(same image as previous) [http://imgur.com/QkPaxr9](http://imgur.com/QkPaxr9)
(discussion list broken images)

6\. Feedback: Why no infinite scroll on the main page? "Load More" works fine,
but seems inconsistent with the in-thread scrolling.

7\. Feedback: The "move" icon on the infinite scroll scrubber seems a touch
odd, because it indicates 2-dimensional motion. Maybe "ns-resize"?

With all that said, this seems very nice. It's simple from a user perspective,
and it's attractively designed. It's responsive, and from a quick glance the
docs look nice. I love the infinite scroll scrubber. Nice work.

~~~
tobyzerner
Thanks for the feedback!

1\. Fixed.

2\.
[https://github.com/flarum/tags/issues/10](https://github.com/flarum/tags/issues/10)

4\. Haha, I don't want to pay for Pusher right now. Will be working on a self-
hosted push solution soon.

6\.
[https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/115](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/115)

~~~
knes
Hey,

I work for Pusher and I have upgrade your account to a business plan for now.

We always love to help up and coming product, especially open source ones so
drop me an email at sylvain@pusher.com to discuss this further. Happy to help.

S

~~~
ohitsdom
This is some customer service right here, well done.

------
tobbyb
We had looked at a bunch of forums from the traditional forums like MyBB,
PhpBB, Flux BB to newer takes on forums like Vanilla, Discourse, Nodebb and
Esotalk an year ago.

I liked the minimalism of Esotalk but it was being phased out in favour of
developing Flarum. I found Vanilla was somehow missing the typical community
feel of forums though lowendtalk is using it and is one of the busier
communities.

Discourse was Ruby and extremely difficult to install and we did manage
eventually but I always felt you need to be comfortable with Ruby or have
managed hosting with Discourse. It's a handful.

Flux BB was one of the fastest of the traditional forums then. Arch Linux uses
Flux BB and its a busy forum. It will be interesting to see which way they go
now that it is going to be Flarum. I remember seeing some heated discussions
in the Fluxbb forums about the shift.

We just added a flarum container in the Flockport app store [1] for those who
want to give it a quick spin. It will work with LXC and most likely Nspawn too
for those who have a recent versions of Systemd.

[https://www.flockport.com/store](https://www.flockport.com/store)

~~~
samuell
I'm surprised Phorum gets so little press:
[http://www.phorum.org](http://www.phorum.org)

Phorum powered MySQL:s own (very large-scale) forum (does it still?) among
other things, and in a way it seems to share a lot of the light-weightedness
with some of the more modern ones in this thread.

------
babatong
Sad to see this eating up and killing off FluxBB. Seems like we're slowly but
surely running out of basic, universal, no-nonsense forum software in favour
of a move to Twitter/Facebook-timelines or Stack Overflow-style layouts, none
of which are great mediums for organised discussion.

~~~
danneu
Xenforo is just about best of breed in the domain of modern, traditional forum
software. Even phpBB is still around.

I don't blame people for trying to come up with new forum paradigms instead of
reimplementing the same solution over and over again.

Then again, forum software that implements modern expectations is never going
to be basic.

~~~
babatong
I would argue however that both Xenforo and phpBB are ridiculously bloated and
should hardly be called basic. phpBB more so than Xenforo obviously. None of
them offer the far more robust approach of FluxBB.

Thankfully, as FluxBB is opensource, it can be forked and saved from this
development direction.

~~~
zyxley
> and should hardly be called basic

That was danneu's point - that any forum that actually implements most of what
people will want out of it (just to start with - separate
subforums/categories, user permissions, tags, thread and user following, local
and email alerts, broad formatting options, media embeds, per-user display
settings, etc etc...) is going to be well beyond "basic" just to get a
userbase in the first place.

------
jbrooksuk
Hey Toby, I'm really glad to see the beta drop! I've been looking at setting
up a forum for [https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io) and have been
holding off doing so, so that we can use Flarum!

How did you find your JS framework change in the end? Did it all go well?

What plans do you have for the future of Flarum? A marketplace perhaps?

~~~
tobyzerner
The JS framework change (Ember to Mithril) was a great decision for us,
especially given our focus on being fast and lightweight. The codebase ended
up being far simpler too. I've been meaning to write a blog post about all the
details!

Beyond stability and more features, I hope to set up some services around
Flarum later this year – an extension marketplace being the first. In order
for Flarum to succeed, building a great ecosystem is a must.

------
lux
This looks great! I've been looking for a good alternative to replace Vanilla
Forums for a while. I think I'll hold off until Flarum stabilizes, since it
seems like a natural replacement as well as a substantial upgrade!

One question:

I've had quite an ongoing fight with spammers, and none of the Vanilla Forums
plugins solve it adequately (including using all of the available plugins
together). How does Flarum help keep spammers at bay?

~~~
tobyzerner
It doesn't at the moment! D: That's something we plan to address very soon
though. Not sure what specific strategies we'll implement – will sit down and
nut it out in the next week or two.
[https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/271](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/271)

~~~
lux
Thanks for the reply! I'll keep an eye on github, and quite look forward to
shiny new forum software soon :)

------
Gmo
What is your forum software bringing compared to Discourse ?

I actually hate Discourse, for me, this is not the way a forum should be, and
from my quick glance at your website, it seems that you go in a very similar
direction (which makes me sad :( )

~~~
jbrooksuk
I setup Discourse for a couple of days and absolutely hated everything about
it.

\- It actually ok to setup, following instructions.

\- The UI is awful.

\- Changing the sub domain didn't work until I executed some commands.

\- The admin panel was awful, just a mess.

\- The frontend didn't really guide the user through what they were doing.

~~~
voltagex_
Plus it takes 1+GB of RAM to run properly.

------
Gigablah
I took a peek at the source code. Extensions are Composer packages that hook
into the core dispatcher, while the frontend extends Mithril components
written in ES6. I'm in love.

------
aesthetics1
The design is incredibly on-point. The breakpoints for smaller screens work
well for me, and everything is where I would expect it to be. The subtle
animations and the crisp/clean interface are very refreshing.

Last time I looked at the forums/bb landscape it still seemed to be dominated
by phpBB, WordPress' bbPress, and vBulletin. I hope these really fall out of
style, as I just don't believe communication online happens in a way that
lends itself to those architectures anymore.

------
tacone
Very nice. I love the technology stack, and am curious whether it can run on
shared hosting. I see some bash scripts in the source though, and I wonder
whether this will alienate windows devs or not.

The technology choices seem to be: PHP + Laravel components + LessCss +
Mithrill.

~~~
tobyzerner
Thanks! The compiled source
([http://flarum.org/download](http://flarum.org/download)) should run on
shared hosting no problems. The bash scripts are only for building that ZIP
that we put up for download, and setting up a Vagrant development environment.
See [http://flarum.org/docs/contributing](http://flarum.org/docs/contributing)
for more info.

~~~
tacone
Another question: how do you plan to deal with SEO?

~~~
tobyzerner
We output a copy of the page's data within <noscript> tags. (e.g.
[http://discuss.flarum.org/?nojs=1](http://discuss.flarum.org/?nojs=1))
Admittedly it's currently pretty bare-bones and not actually very optimized,
haha

------
joshmarinacci
Why is almost all forum software written in php? Is there something about the
language that makes it ideal for forums? Is it a historical artifact?

~~~
pygy_
It is a prerequisite for wide adoption. It is far easier to find a free or
cheap PHP host.

~~~
lie2815
That, and PHP projects are the easiest to install on web hosts.

------
mortenjorck
I was looking at forum software for the first time in years just last month,
and was surprised at how fresh EsoTalk looked compared to the traditionally
crufty UI patterns of even more progressive forum packages. As you might
imagine, I was then completely blown away when I saw its successor!
Congratulations on the beta launch; it looks amazing.

------
JorgeGT
On a side note, does anyone else find the text of the website difficult to
read due to low contrast against the background?

------
raziel2p
I couldn't find information about this in the documentation. How hard is it
going to be either to replace the core authentication with my own
implementation, or use Flarum's authentication outside of Flarum? My goal
would be to write a lightweight CMS which shares a login with the forum.

~~~
tobyzerner
This is something we haven't tackled yet, but we definitely want to make this
kind of thing easy at some point in the future.

~~~
raziel2p
Is there an issue on github I can subscribe to for this?

~~~
tobyzerner
Just made one:
[https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/274](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/274)

~~~
raziel2p
What if I don't want to use Laravel? :)

------
JasonSage
Okay, this bugs me just a little bit.

From the story page[1]:

> A piece of software that depends on extensions will surely fail without the
> establishment of an ecosystem. I do not intend to make the same mistake with
> Flarum.

This seems incorrect to me. If you look today, there are still a several
people that actively develop plugins for esoTalk. The community has
contributed plugins for Markdown, OAuth, signatures, and social sharing. I
myself have made Mandrill and Mailchimp integrations within the last couple
months.

> Without the feedback of a team, I have produced some low-quality code and
> APIs that will surely need revision.

This statement about Flarum sounds to me like the stated reason esoTalk[2] was
left in favor of a complete rewrite—it needed a lot of work.

Reviewing some of the history... There was an open source forum solution that
had an established base of users that was completely abandoned for an
attempted kickstarter of a ground-up rewrite. The kickstarter didn't work, so
they're bootstrapping it and going to try to monetize with a paid marketplace
and a "service-based business." It all strikes me as a promotional effort to
base a kickstarter and a business around.

Toby has already been successful in making a fast and simple forum software,
esoTalk. Toby, if your interests are in making freely available forum software
but your career path remains focused on medical school, why invest so much
time into starting a business around new forum software instead of just
putting some time into revamping what you already had?

I'm trying to see the motivation behind this as something which would justify
killing off your own forum project and leaving folks who use your software,
besides making some cash on a side business, but I can't.

[1]: [http://flarum.org/story/](http://flarum.org/story/) [2]:
[https://github.com/esotalk/esoTalk](https://github.com/esotalk/esoTalk)

~~~
tobyzerner
Fair points. I guess I consider esoTalk to be somewhat of a lost cause in
terms of the way it's built. It's a pain to implement fixes and features,
maintain, and is pretty limited in what it can do (and how it can be
extended). Simply put, I didn't enjoy working on it.

When I said "I have produced some low-quality code and APIs that will surely
need revision", I'm mostly talking about more semantic things like class
naming and organization. The majority of Flarum's architecture is very solid,
testable, and will be easy to maintain. Doesn't compare to esoTalk.

Admittedly, if I just wanted to start a business and make some cash, you're
right: I probably could've just persisted with esoTalk. But it's not all about
money – it's also about doing the best work that I can, enjoying it, and
making damn good forum software with great potential.

There will eventually be a migration path from esoTalk to Flarum, and I still
merge PRs from time to time... so I like to think I'm not completely
abandoning the esoTalk folk!

------
danneu
The in-topic scrubber is great UX compared to pagination.

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/d2lm88...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/d2lm886x.png)

~~~
zyxley
I wonder how well it scales to upwards of thousands of comments, though. There
are some forums I've seen where it's not unusual to have threads that are
several hundred pages of 20+ posts each.

It also seems like prime territory to have something added in the style of the
Xenforo threadmarks plugin: [https://github.com/Sidane/xenforo-
threadmarks](https://github.com/Sidane/xenforo-threadmarks)

Basically, the thread author (or admins) mark particular posts, and a table of
contents to them gets auto-generated, and each of those posts in the thread
gets forward/back buttons to skip to the next/previous. It makes long-running
threads much more navigable, especially single-purpose ones (game
walkthroughs, following the news about specific events, etc).

~~~
danneu
I wonder the same thing.

Massive threads are somewhat of a proving ground for every forum
implementation and feature. Like when you first realize that `OFFSET` SQL for
pagination just isn't gonna cut it.

For example, I recently read a field report of someone migrating their Xenforo
forum to Discourse ([https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-me-6-weeks-
in/319...](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-for-me-6-weeks-in/31900))
that had issues with megathreads after the migration since Discourse sends
down a list of all post_ids in the topic, a known issue.

That threadmarks plugin is a brilliant idea, like a curated table-of-contents
or places-of-interest. I'm going to implement that on my forum.

------
krapp
I really like that someone is still trying to innovate on PHP forums, and
_not_ by simply offering a service. There is still a market for self-hosted
forums, and most of the current offerings are basically rotting on the vine.

------
leejoramo
What are the blockers on using Flarum in production? (Bugs, changing API's,
etc) I would consider putting this into light use for a private forum to with
maybe 10 to 40 users. If it is not yet ready for this, when would you expect
it to be? (Note: your Roadmap is currently empty.)

My experience with many other projects would be that sometime prior to a
Release Candidate you would want people to be testing and using the Beta.

I am just evaluating Discourse for a small group, but it looks like Flarum
would be a better fit for my use case.

~~~
tobyzerner
It's buggy, prone to spam, probably not secure, missing features, etc.
Probably should've named it an alpha, almost. But if you're game you could
give it a spin - we're running our support forum on it currently. Will fill
out that roadmap tomorrow :)

------
zyxley
This looks interesting, but it would need proper, nested subforums that are
more discrete than the current tag system to really substitute for any of the
major forums I use.

This isn't because of navigation, but because of the alerts and other cruft
that particular sections in large, long-used forums accumulate over time. Per-
section alerts (boxes at the top of the page separate from threads) in
particular don't seem to be replicable here outside of the descriptions at the
top.

------
clarkevans
Will Flarum function as a QA site, with a way to vote up answers like stack
overflow?

~~~
JasonSage
Going off of how Toby's last forum project went[1], most things that aren't
essential to the project are left open to implement as plugins. esoTalk does
have a plugin that lets conversation authors mark one reply as an answer, so I
think it's reasonable to guess that one will eventually appear for Flarum.

[1]: [http://esotalk.org](http://esotalk.org)

------
Curiositry
Great job Toby & Franz!

I’ve used PhpBB (spam magnet), NodeBB (too buggy), and am now on Discourse,
which is great but eats server space for breakfast.

Flarum look very cool — I’ll give it a spin as soon as it’s stable.

------
alberth
Toby

Given than flarum.org is down due to moderate traffic, any immediate plans to
include sometype of content caching within Flarum?

------
Xunxi
I'm really in love with this. Subtle but comprehensive UI devoid of all the
clutter.

------
alfg
It's coming along great! Good work!

I really liked esoTalk and looking forward to installing this soon!

------
techaddict009
What is your technology stack?

Looks good overall.

~~~
tobyzerner
Thanks! Technology stack is PHP, JavaScript (Mithril), Less. More info here:
[http://flarum.org/docs/extend/](http://flarum.org/docs/extend/)

~~~
techaddict009
You mean mere core php? (I am from mob so nt seen the code on git)

No use of modern framework like laravel or something?

~~~
treahauet
Looks like it uses some Illuminate (Laravel) components:
[https://github.com/flarum/core/blob/master/composer.json](https://github.com/flarum/core/blob/master/composer.json)

------
J_Darnley
> You're viewing the HTML-only version of Flarum Community. Upgrade your
> browser for the full version.

Thanks but my browser is already the latest version. At least you show
something without javascript.

~~~
tobyzerner
Flarum automatically redirects to the non-JS version if there's an error
booting up the JS app. What browser are you using?

~~~
J_Darnley
Palemoon 25.7.0

I do see more than just that message. On
[http://discuss.flarum.org/](http://discuss.flarum.org/) I see a list of links
to various posts.

~~~
tobyzerner
Mind reporting an issue for this?
([https://github.com/flarum/core/issues](https://github.com/flarum/core/issues))
I can't test directly because I'm using a Mac, but it would be great if we can
continue investigating on GitHub :)

------
xena
I really would like it if people started writing these kinds of things in
modern languages.

~~~
benwilber0
go for it.

Also, there's nothing wrong with PHP.

