![]() I really respect the best classic forums engines as Invision, XenForo, etc but now want to give my users something more fresh and modern. I’m a very experienced sw dev and now choosing a forum engine for my new web project. But Discourse attracted me with advantages that it still retains: a clearer direction, a faster pace of development, and better support. Although it only had two part-time developers back then, it was a simpler and prettier proposition with some similar new features like infinite scrolling. I think that Flarum compared a lot better against Discourse back in 2015 than it does now in 2020. I remember looking at both platforms before I joined at the end of 2015. I do believe Flarum will offer the same functionality eventually in terms of plugins / extensions but I can’t wait that long.įor the record, Flarum has always been a much smaller project but started about the same time as Discourse - check out their Twitter account creation dates: Don’t get me wrong, even Discourse doesn’t have everything, but it is closer to the perfect forum that I need. I can say, with confidence that there is lots of good documentation for most of the things I want to do and lots of help in Discourse. This is the reason I started with bitnami but I soon learned that they have outdated images, so I am now on the current install. I prefer to just have a standard docker-composer.yml and then configure it. There were was much more complexity because I had already flarum on my server so I had to configure the yml to run on a different port. It did take an awfully long time to configure Discourse, more than I imagined. Flarum is simple to install relatively compared to Discourse. I use a VPS so it doesn’t matter, but because Flarum has PHP, it can be used on shared which is why some users will go for it. I’d also say one big advantage to Flarum is that it can be used on shared hosting. This is their docs for appearance atm, it’s empty: Given that I can’t spend the time and effort in trying to develop my own extensions that already exist in Discourse nor can I commission developers to prioritize my needs, I went with Discourse finally. It was told to me that would be easy to create this on Flarum using CSS, but when asked how - no answer. There was a simple extension I was looking for - the topic list thumbnails. Flarum is still in beta and it is recommended to not be used in production as well. People have tested this and given a lot of feedback to make and fix most of the issues. However, I guess since Discourse has been around longer, there are more plugins, more theme components, etc. It has a smaller dev team and they are working very hard. It’s more lightweight, but it lacks many extensions. I noticed on the flarum forums, it was a question that was asked a lot, but then it should be documented so that people can do theming more easily.įlarum is faster and snappier. I asked around to get answers on how to change the custom CSS to change simple things like my header font color. The theming in flarum doesn’t have as much documentation as I would’ve liked. I had to visit each of their user profiles individually. I couldn’t search for users easily to assign them user groups. Rather, I had to install an extension for user directory which would appear in the sidebar of the homepage. However, it was too basic that it lacked many features. The user permission system was something I like (and still believe it to be superior to Discourse). I totally configured most of what I wanted. I took a quick glance and saw the best modern options were nodeBB, flarum, and Discourse, but I dropped nodeBB since it didn’t have the infinite scroll and still used page numbers to flip through threads. That was about 8 years ago when XenForo, myBB, and IPS were kind of the leading forum softwares out there. I originally came from IPS (Invision Power Suite). ![]() I run a gaming forum and I have a large Discord server (~50-100k). I thought I should chime in here since I’ve tried both recently. ![]()
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