Ask HN: For a simple forum, should I use bbPress or is there a HN/reddit style one?

[benhoyt]

I'm thinking of starting a discussion forum over at my Gifty.co.nz website. I've never liked heavy and ugly phpBB-style forums. I'm really keen on simple and minimalist, so I like bbPress. And PunBB looks okay.

But something with the simplicity and threadedness of Hacker News or reddit would really be great.

Does anyone have any ideas or experience?

[mdasen]

Well, if you want something with the features of HN or reddit, why not use the source code of HN or reddit?

They're both open source and you could alter it so that submissions couldn't be links if you so chose.

http://arclanguage.org/ http://code.reddit.com/

[benhoyt → mdasen]

HN is simple, but it's written in Arc/Lisp, which I don't know, so customization and maintenance would be difficult.

reddit is a possibility, because I know Python, but I felt it was quite large-scale. Maybe I should look at the code properly, though. Thanks!

[jaycee]

I'm a pretty big fan of Vanilla (http://getvanilla.com/). It doesn't natively support threading, but I think there may be a plugin for that. It's out of the box install is very clean, very simple, and very useful.

Rolling something from the HN or Reddit codebase sounds like a pretty interesting project, though.

[rrhyne → jaycee]

Vanilla integrates with other AUTH systems fairly easily.

[jraines]

You could also use http://www.slinkset.com for a hosted solution that you could still point your own domain at (assuming you have control over your CNAME records)

[ncbutters → jraines]

If you choose to try out slinkset feel free to contact me (email in profile) and I can help you with any questions you may have.

[jsdalton]

I can't remember where I heard good things about this one, but I believe I did at some point:

http://getvanilla.com/

You might also look into whether http://intensedebate.com/ would work for your purposes...it does have threading and voting.

Finally if you or your developer(s) know Python/Django, you could check out the following two Django plugins:

http://code.google.com/p/django-threadedcomments/ http://code.google.com/p/django-voting/

You could pretty easily put together a threaded, votable discussion thread based on these. (In fact, you can find a whole lot of other social networking features in Pinax, which I'd describe as a social networking framework for Django: http://code.google.com/p/django-hotclub/)

Hope some of these suggestions are helpful.

[dejb]

If you just mean hierarchies of threads then I know Drupal forums do this. But if you are looking for the voting and vote ordering then I'm not sure. I suspect you'd find some module in Drupal though.

[pavelludiq]

both reddit and HN are open source http://code.reddit.com/ http://arclanguage.org/install (news.arc is included in the arc source).

[pstinnett]

Try pgBoard. I don't think it has anything to do with Paul Graham (the pg stands for pretty good). Some examples:

board.vivalavinyl.org board.crewcial.org

Here's the source http://code.google.com/p/pgboard/

It's actually a lot like HN.

[dollarz]

Offtopic: How can I ask question here?

[swombat → dollarz]

Click on "submit", then type in an "Ask HN" type title and type your question in the body.

If it's an interesting question, it will get voted up, probably.

[known]

http://www.kubelabs.com/phpdug/ if you like digg style forum.

[thomas]

i'd stay far away from bbpress. reddit would work or you have drupal forums as dejb pointed out.

[benhoyt → thomas]

Why would you stay far away from bbPress? I really like how simple it looks&feels, and how one just needs PHP+MySQL to get it going. (I'll look into the Drupal forums.)

[chanux]

Pligg.com maybe?