
Ask HN: Forum software, develop or out of the box solutions? - jamocon
Hi,<p>At some point in the <i>hopefully</i> not to distant future a project I&#x27;m working on will require some forum software. This stage is still in the conceptual phase and I&#x27;m hoping to clear up a few things and get some input.<p>Design wise, it will be basic, &quot;retro&quot; even, designed <i>around</i> early BBS systems. It will run on a &quot;darknet&quot; server, probably on the tor network - because I&#x27;ve never set up a tor server. No it has nothing to do with drugs. It won&#x27;t be a forum you can just sign up for, as mentioned it&#x27;s part
of bigger project. Although I&#x27;m considering invites once a certain threshold has been meet (ie: xposts&#x2F;ykarma&quot; or some combination).<p>From a community standpoint, I hope to provoke thoughtful, intellectual discussions and while it will be primarily tech focused there won&#x27;t be any rules regarding topics, except the hard coded ones. Which is where I&#x27;m having &quot;problems&quot;.<p>What I need is something like: 
A user may only create x(I&#x27;m thinking 2 but up to 5) threads, across all categories in a day.<p>A user may only post in a thread once every 12 hours. (Borrowed from early days of dial up bbs systems,things wasn&#x27;t as &quot;instant&quot; back then).<p>Once a user has posted, it will be editable for up to 15 minutes after that it will be locked. No revisions possible and for the sake on continuity in a thread you won&#x27;t be able to delete it.<p>Now I haven&#x27;t played with any forum software for ~8 years, so I don&#x27;t actually know what&#x27;s out there at the moment but from what I remember old forum software used to be pretty heavy and have limited add on capabilities. I openly admit I haven&#x27;t done any googling. So if you have any recommendations as a starting point it will be
extremely helpful.<p>As an aside, I figure this is the perfect time to ask a generalized tech crowd their opinions. What do you think? Would you use a forum designed like the above?
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chatmasta
You’d probably be best suited using vBulletin / phpBB and developing plugins
for to solve your relatively few custom requirements. Don’t waste time
building custom forum software when you don’t even have a product or
customers...

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jamocon
Thanks. I actually have a little experience with both of them so that'll help.
1 of the reason I was considering building a custom forum implementation was
the learning experience but after a little research yesterday I may have
_slightly_ underestimated the task/time frame.

I'm not actually selling, nor creating a product. It's more of a educational
thing, both for me (I've already learned a bit about SCADA systems, no doubt
I'll learn more in different areas) and hopefully others. The forum part for
instance serves 2 purposes, 1 it's part of a egg hunt & basic crypto level and
2. To satisfy my own nostalgia for old forums and hopefully bring a couple
like minded people together :)

PS. There are no tips here

