Flarum – Simple forum software for building great communities

by maydemir • 4 years ago

82 56 4 years ago

marban• 4 years ago

Discord should have never escaped the gaming realm.

I'm happier than ever with Discord since I started using it for casual screen sharing/voice chat with my gaming buddy. It really is a stretch for everything except gaming/social communities.

itsjloh• 4 years ago

I've seen quite a few Flarum forums pop up recently. I wonder how it stacks up against Discourse in resource requirements? Discourse isn't a lightweight app (not a criticism, just an observation).

luceos11• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: project manager of Flarum

Although Flarum scales very well, it is not losing sight of shared hosting environments. The only requirement is composer/ssh; hosting providers usually offer these nowadays.

Flarum only released its first stable last year and so has some features missing, yet https://extiverse.com already lists over 500 extensions compatible with Flarum v1.3. Relying on much used technology allows for fairly easy adoption by developers to contribute.

An interesting comparison between Forum software can be found on Slant: https://www.slant.co/topics/898/~best-web-forum-software-pac...

revskill2• 4 years ago

I'm sorry, but i failed to install php or composer many times before in Windows.

Installing PHP in Windows is harder than building a production-level enterprise application in Typescript, sadly but it happened to me.

Good job, PHP.

spacemanmatt2• 4 years ago

As I run a high risk of coming into contact with the code, PHP is a hard stop for me. It looks really great otherwise.

st_goliath• 4 years ago

I mainly do C/Assembly for a living and haven't touched webdev stuff since I was ~14, and I haven't used Windows as my main OS since ~2008 so I'm quite a bit out of the loop here on both issues, and I'm sorry if I make some silly/outdated assumptions here, but that statement about PHP on Windows still comes a bit as a surprise to me.

Back in the day, we simply downloaded a WAMP/XAMPP package, which was a typical windows installer. The thing came with a simple management UI where you could e.g. point the document root to the root directory of your development tree and everything just worked. IIRC similar packages were floating around with other languages or Postgres instead of MySQL.

So what the hell happened since then? Why did those things get so complicated? Does the answer involve complexity introduced by container/scaling/management/IDE/framework/... software? Did installing Software on Windows become more difficult than simply running an installer? Doesn't Windows even have package management nowadays (chocolatey/some App store/...)? If it's so complicated, don't Windows devs nowadays have their trusty WSL anyway?

EDIT: I just looked around a bit on Google, apparently WAMP is still a thing, and Composer also has a Windows installer, which allegedly can work with the former (https://duvien.com/blog/setting-wamp-composer-and-git-window...).

chwilson• 4 years ago

Things like Laragon (https://laragon.org/) have taken up the XAMPP mantle in recent years. Not sure about production (I moved away from Windows for dev stuff similarly), but developing with PHP on Windows has definitely got easier, imo.

revskill2• 4 years ago

Ah, there're some services that provide cli tool, which uses PHP.

First step to install that tool is to install php.

I don't want a web environment here, just a php with version in my system to install that tool, but failed. I don't know how to begin, try and failed. Hopelessly.

teekert• 4 years ago

Windows (why? This is server software right?) => Docker => Linux (happy place) => PHP

blahyawnblah2• 4 years ago

Would be more viable if they had a file upload/download module that didn't allocate a files worth of space per download per user. The FoF module is not usable.

luceos11• 4 years ago

A new version of FoF Upload is being worked on to truncate unused files and map uploads to posts. I think it would be a great addition to add user restrictions too. What an excellent idea, it's the first time I've see someone mention it.

Ref: https://github.com/FriendsOfFlarum/upload/pull/319

matteocontrini• 4 years ago

What do you mean with "allocate a files worth of space per download per user"?

blahyawnblah2• 4 years ago

In /tmp/somefolder is a copy of each file that is currently being downloaded

Brajeshwar• 4 years ago

Found Flarum on PikaPods for those who wants to try hosting it without the self-hosting hassle. I have been playing around with PikaPods for a while.

https://www.pikapods.com/apps#communication

luceos11• 4 years ago

There's also https://freeflarum.com.

js4ever• 4 years ago

Flarum is also available as a managed service on Elestio: https://elest.io/open-source/flarum

Atomskun• 4 years ago

Can I scroll up to a thread to the first message without Javascript running to fetch previous posts? We had this in the 00-ties.

It would also be great if I can Ctrl+F to use my browser's search feature to look through all messages instead of relying on a dynamic JavaScript one.

mrjeeves• 4 years ago

Yes, you can do the first one. There's a post scrubber on the right hand side of any thread with buttons for top and bottom.

Disclaimer: Flarum core dev

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

They're asking if posts are loaded in and out with Javascript as you scroll.

longrod• 4 years ago

I think what changed over the years in the "product discussions" space/is that the sentiment has shifted from "users will come to us" to "we must go to our users". Platforms like Twitter (surprising as it is), Discord, Reddit etc. where a user already is dissuades a lot of products from hosting their own forums.

It's just quicker for a user to join a Discord community or tweet/DM a question where they already have an account. Even with things like OAuth2, the mental burden of creating a new account is there. Not to mention learning how to use the new platform. And the total gain after all the effort is trivial.

I think at this point in time, it's not reasonable to ask users to sign up to your own private platform unless you have a huge and loyal following. Users have become lazy due to the abundance of alternatives.

When I get an issue/bug/question, the first thing I check is if they have an issue tracker. Preferably GitHub. After that comes their various social accounts; Discord, Twitter, Reddit etc. If none of those work out I would most probably ditch the software. Reaching out via custom channels is cumbersome.

With that being said, this looks really cool although "delightfully simple" won't be an objective feeling among your users. Good job none the less! I wish you the best.

rkagerer• 4 years ago

It's funny I don't use Discord much and consider it more of a pain in the a** than doing a quick forum signup (but I use a password manager so less friction than the average user).

cies2• 4 years ago

Looks nice. Though my mindshare goes to Lemmy at this point. It's slightly different, but a fediverse project and pretty feature compete at this point:

https://join-lemmy.org/

SiempreViernes• 4 years ago

Do you have an example of lemmy being used as a forum rather than as a link aggregator with comments?

cies2• 4 years ago

Nope i dont. Not even sure if that's possible. Should not be too hard to add it.

The codebase is pretty rad. Rust makes it insanely fast, and the db schema alone thought me a few things about optimizing a PG schema for high perf.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn• 4 years ago

Aren't "great communities" a function of people rather than software?

luceos11• 4 years ago

I think the right word would be "empowerment". Software opens up the ability of communities to grow. Security, usability, accessibility, performance and many more factors play an important role to empower communities in growing a great community.

edward• 4 years ago

I fixed a spelling mistake: https://github.com/flarum/flarum/pull/81

ricardobeat2• 4 years ago

I know it feels harmless, but this kind of low-effort drive-by PR is loathed by maintainers. It's not contributing anything significant to the project, but requires some of their time and gives you visibility in the changelog.

quesera• 4 years ago

I disagree.

Spelling mistakes should be fixed.

A PR is click-click-done, whereas a textual description of the mistake requires small but real effort on the part of a project member.

And absolutely no one gives a flying crap about visibility in the changelog.

mattarm• 4 years ago

Why have you come to have this opinion?

Personally, I have sent these kinds of PRs out and received only approvals and thanks from maintainers. When in an approver/maintainer role myself, these kinds of PRs are trivial to approve and I appreciate them. The PRs that change a bunch of stuff, are large, hard to review, poorly described, poorly justified, poorly tested, etc., are the annoying ones.

luceos11• 4 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to provide a PR. It is much appreciated. Even minor, it improves the source code quality.

pelagicAustral• 4 years ago

Still more of a fan of the ol' SMF, vBulletin, IPB, phpbb style forums. Probably just nostalgia.

mid-kid2• 4 years ago

Am on a similar boat, I simply find the boards that combine different categories of threads into one page and have an infinite scrollbar on the side to jump to different points in time in the thread instead of pages (like discourse) very confusing to navigate.

It may be nostalgia but I spent a decade perfecting my navigation skills through such forums, and I don't see an improvement with the new ones.

wolrah• 4 years ago

My thoughts as well, when I think "forum" I think hierarchical subforums full of threads listed in last-posted order. I do not like the modern tagged jumble of threads style like Discourse and this, and I hate the fact that so many companies in particular are removing long-standing classic forums in favor of this junk. Especially because as usual they're half-assing the migration so years or even decades of history are just being lost.

luceos11• 4 years ago

Flarum is actually extensible enough to do that too, we just set a different default.

https://extiverse.com/extension/askvortsov/flarum-categories

DoItToMe81• 4 years ago

I don't think it's just nostalgia. The bizarre, not quite phone, not quite PC monitor infinite scrolling design of these neoforums is awful, and far worse for effectively finding and cataloguing info.

marginalia_nu• 4 years ago

The Hard Problem of forum software is how to prevent spam bots and drive-by exploits. It's what killed the previous generation of forums. Reddit usually gets the blame, but that is only true in that they had the economies of scale to survive the increasingly hostile internet ecosystem.

I'm curious how Flarum approaches this.

luceos11• 4 years ago

Aside from bundling an Akismet extension, as a development team we constantly adapt to changing spam runs and publishing these preventions for the public to use. Additionally, being extremely extensible, third party developers have contributed extensions that provide spam prevention and cleanup too, like stopforumspam and others.

productceo• 4 years ago

Why do entrepreneurs NOT use ready-made forum softwares like this to start startups? Clever use of general tools like this (maybe not specifically Flarum) can help them launch communities or marketplaces in less than a day. Is it as optimal as a in-house built forum? No. Should they be saving time on reinventing the undifferentiated code part so that they can test the core business concept and build out their differentiated networks of users? Yes.

spiderfarmer• 4 years ago

Well, it's probably because:

- you're competing with hobbyists that have the same look & feel

- hobbyists are online when the community is (mostly outside of 9-5)

- members of the community demand custom functionality specific to their interest.

Also:

- building communities is very hard

- they're not easy to monetise

I've built two successful communities in related niches and I'm pretty sure that succeeded because I was young and early. It's not easy to replicate now.

mhitza• 4 years ago

Most, let's call it, web software is a handrolled system with its own framework, design patterns, etc. Flarum is a great example of web software that rolled it's own, WordPress is another far more popular piece of software that does it's own thing.

The point being, that unless you're already familiar in the "system language" of the software you want to hack upon, or unless the software is very light on abstraction, it's gonna be pretty inconvenient to MVP on top of it.

I've tried in the past to take that approach with few small projects and gave up pretty quickly. In my view it's the same as getting onboarded on a new project - it's slow. The only difference is that with OSS software you might have a bit more documentation available

brightball• 4 years ago

I mean, it feels like everybody uses Discord forums. I think custom built forums are probably the outlier. I can’t even think of any that exist.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

To run Flarum, you will need:

* Apache (with mod_rewrite enabled) or Nginx

* PHP 7.3+ with the following extensions: curl, dom, fileinfo, gd, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo_mysql, tokenizer, zip MySQL 5.6+/8.0.23+ or MariaDB 10.0.5+

* SSH (command-line) access to run Composer

Unfortunately the dependencies are not as simple as I hoped (other than SSH). Are there single binary forum software (perhaps written in Go/Rust) that use SQLite, that people have experience with?

I guess I am looking for the Caddy of forum software.

mid-kid2• 4 years ago

This is a bog standard LAMP setup, they just specified the specific php modules which might not be enabled by default (but usually are). Not sure what's complex about it, I'm sure you can drop it into a default XAMPP install and run.

luceos11• 4 years ago

You can ;) We are not losing sight of the lowly shared hosting users. The only tough requirement - which many shared hosting companies already provide - is commandline/ssh access so you can use/install composer.

unraveller• 4 years ago

https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum https://forum.nim-lang.org

uses sqlite, is actively improved, they claim the nim language makes small cross-platform binaries but none for this release it seems.

Gentil2• 4 years ago

About time Flarum is noticed! I have been using Flarum through unitedbsd.com. It's nice and snappy. Might be a lil too modern for some communities. Especially OSS ones. But is fine IMO.

My problem with discourse has been that Firefox shows FB tracker warning in irregular intervals on the top-left corner. It's says FB tracker. It makes me uneasy. But somehow it is the standard for all OSS communities.

micromacrofoot2• 4 years ago

I noticed this before and upon looking at the source, it only seems to apply to Discourse sites that allow Facebook for account creation and login. There's no built-in Facebook tracking (that would be scary indeed).

Gentil2• 4 years ago

Their share button does shadow tracking. You think a login module doesn't?

toastercat• 4 years ago

Flarum is a sizable open source application that uses Mithril.js as the front-end framework. Flarum devs: I'm wondering, how well did Mithril scale and are you happy with the choice?

luceos11• 4 years ago

Just before releasing stable we revisited this choice and looked at alternatives like vuejs, react and svelte. But mithril came out as a winner, it's very thin, extremely flexible and extensible. Especially extensibility - for us - has been a huge factor, because that is Flarums superpower.

Now that we've added typescript, things only became easier.

synergy20• 4 years ago

Did not realize Flarum reached 1.0 sometime ago.

can the replies be configured contained in the related thread that is indented too for easy reading? I found put all discussions and replies at the same level is hard to follow.

luceos11• 4 years ago

There was one extension that managed to do that with one nested level, but it's been abandoned. I also know of a commercial party whom are currently working on a threaded view extension as well.

Flarum – Simple forum software for building great communities

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