Choosing a platform in this day and age.

[Shawn Gossman]

Forums are really different than they were 10-15 years ago.

Online communities, in general, are different.

Many are going with modern platforms that are hosted. Circle, Slack, Mighty Networks... You mostly have to pay, but it's a hostage plan, meaning to keep it, you pay. If you quit paying, you lose access to your members and content.

It's rented space, but it's popular, even more so than these traditional forums.

So, in this day and age, with modern changes, how do you ultimately decide on what platform to use for your community?

 

[zappaDPJ]

I have to maintain ownership of my member's content on all the forums I'm involved with so I always lean towards a more traditional forum package running on my hardware.

At the moment everything runs on highly customized versions of SMF. I'd prefer to use XenForo but the editor has too many bugs and it lacks functionality that I need such a image search.

 

[cpvr]

I prefer to maintain ownership of everything and not rely on rented platform software where I’m not technically the owner.

Therefore, Xenforo is my go-to forum software, and my content is hosted on my own servers.

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

I have multiple websites and forums hosted on a single VPS server, therefore any Cloud services are very UNappealing, because they are atrociously expensive. Self-hosting is way easier on the wallet, plus I have a VPS server with tons of space and resources.

If I only had ONE site and it was a community, then maybe I would consider a Cloud service. I'm currently pretty loyal to Invision, but if I had only ONE community, I would seriously consider Mighty Networks.

What IPS needs is a mobile app like Mighty Networks, Kajabi, etc.