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open source forum software with good documentation?
chihcherng
Veteran
I'm thinking about starting a forum to build the reputation for my own domain, but I know my knowledge regarding operating a forum a bit lacking. Is there an open source forum software with good documentation?
Comments
There is no such thing as a FREE open source forum. Cheapest one I can recommend costs $50,000 a year.
For open source, there is one available. https://www.phpbb.com/support/
Discourse, Vanilla, Flarum, to name a few.
MyBB, SMF
NodeBB is my personal favorite. Good docs section here.
I like phpBB. It's open source. If you are willing to purchase a Xenforo license, you can go with that. The Xenforo demo is available here.
What makes you say that? There are many good 100% open source projects which are free as well.
There are plenty. If you want good advice you should at least tell us which of the languages (php, ruby, ...) you know best and how good your admin knowledge/experience is, unless you just want an unordered list of software that you might get as well at wikipedia...
There's no "sarcasm" in that comment! Not every sentence can be called sarcasm
I asked about open source forum software, because their documentation, contrary to commercial ones', should be freely available. I‘m not a programmer, and I'm not trying to modify the software. I know how to manage a Linux system generally, but have never managed/moderated a forum before. I want to familiarize myself with issues like forum moderation by reading documentation first.
bsdguy's still right though -- you should at least say what your preferred stack is (LAMP, etc). Owing to the age of forums as a concept online, there's literally dozens of FOSS packages out there. You won't find how to "operate a forum" in software documentation any more than you'd find "how to run a successful business" in the documentation for Point of Sale software.
Anyway, the big divide last I checked is between what you might call "old school" players that want a traditional SomethingAwful-style forum - where there's groups of categories, categories ("forums"), forums have threads, and threads have posts - and newer forums that focus on a more modern layout/style and play down that structure a bit. For the former, phpBB and SMF are the two stalwarts. For the newer ones, try something like Discourse, NodeBB and Flarum. Do note that all of the ones I'm naming have already been named for you by helpful people.
Btw, not sure what you mean by "freely available" documentation - both UBB.Threads and Invision Power Board, two of the bigger pieces of non-free forum software have their documentation publically available and posted. Very few companies wall off their documentation.
"New Style Forums": Flarum, Discourse
Traditional Forums: Xenforo, Elkarte/SMF
The rest are crap imo.
FluxBB/PunBB are great.
Slightly OT: The older vBulletin and IPB versions were one of my favourites (example: vBulletin.org). Not sure what they are doing with vBulletin connect, but it seems like a mess.
A good nostalgic trip would be idforums.net. The same forum software that d2jsp.org used to use.