
Ask HN: State of Internet forums - dylz
I need a forum. I do not have much money to spend for this (personal thing; probably can do up to $49-59).<p>What is the stablest&#x2F;greatest&#x2F;latest thing out there with at least some plugins, and preferably a way to implement a single SSO system against an existing database with at least a few thousand users?<p>* I can&#x27;t afford vBulletin, Xenforo, etc.<p>* Last I checked, phpBB no longer serves downloads temporarily due to some hack, or something, I don&#x27;t know.<p>* SMF&#x27;s community and ecosystem is kind of terrible.<p>* FluxBB is nice, but I&#x27;m waiting for the laravel release for integration, otherwise migrating will be another pain.<p>* PunBB is basically an abandoned FluxBB?<p>* NodeBB, FlaskBB seem really immature at this point, or at least not enough moderation tools or other management, and I am not comfortable enough in node.js to do manual editing.<p>* esoTalk is nice, but effectively stalled while waiting for Flarum.<p>* Discourse&#x27;s resource usage is a bit on the high side, and I am not comfortable enough in rails&#x2F;ruby to do manual editing.<p>* Why are the vast majority of forums in PHP?
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hardwaresofton
I think the mast majority of forum software is in PHP, because it's what was
around long ago when forums were in their hayday...

Unfortunately I don't have any good suggestions one way or the other on which
forum software you should use.

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krapp
> Why are the vast majority of forums in PHP?

Easy - the vast majority of forums are set up by people who just want a forum,
and aren't necessarily technically savvy, and PHP is dead simple to deploy to
on a free shared account. Most of the popular forums are dead now because
forums in general have been supplanted by social media, and hosted services.

It's kind of unfortunate because I think there is still a place for self-
hosted forums.

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lowken10
Check out Discourse.org. I set this for for Dane Maxwell & Andy Drish of the
Foundation and it is a solid modern forum solution. And it's open source.

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jray
Try [http://www.mybb.com/](http://www.mybb.com/)

But the most powerful forum is phpBB

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MrBra
Since you checked many of them, did you also take a look at Mybb?

