Flarum

[Azareal]

I personally tried to forget this awful thing exists, but as people seem to be intrigued by it on Adminloop, I'll go over it briefly:

It's basically a clone of Discourse with an ever so slightly better theme, although NodeBB can instantly beat it and so can Discourse Themes, most likely.

Beyond that. It's worse at every level. It's basically a me too.

It doesn't have live anything. I believe you have to refresh to get anything out of it.

When you scroll down for more posts, Discourse loads the next chunk in the background for when you'll need it. Flarum instead makes you wait ten to twenty seconds for the next chunk to load in.

Discourse remembers where you are on topics, which is critically important for an infinite scrolling software.

No 2FA.

It's developed by developers who don't really know what they're doing compared to Jeff Atwood and friends.

It isn't audited by security experts and uses a fundamentally insecure stack. I could probably casually find security vulnerabilities, if I cared to look.

The Kickstarter felt like someone trying to scam me. They ripped off Laravel's slogan and kept repeating it over and over, it was a little jarring. It was cancelled anyway because no one gave them any money.

 

[Jerlene]

I think I brought it up over there. I was curious about it because it looked incredibly simple. It's definitely a clone of Discourse though, at least at first glance.

 

[Azareal]

I think I brought it up over there. I was curious about it because it looked incredibly simple. It's definitely a clone of Discourse though, at least at first glance.

It's making waves in some circles, as it's supposed to be easier to install than Discourse, but I think it gives up a lot of the benefits of going to Discourse in the first place lol

 

[meetdilip]

The thing about Flarum as an end user is that it will be a good alternative to free forum users who have no choice but to use phpBB or MyBB. Which lack a few things for many webmasters of today's age. But sadly Flarum is not stable yet.

 

[Azareal]

As a possible sign that the traditional forum market is collapsing (along with the top players leaking market-share to bbPress, Discourse and Social Media), Flarum is actually a merger from scratch of two projects.

EsoTalk (which I don't think anyone has heard of, but a lead dev hails from there) and FluxBB which was a secondary forum software with a thousand or so sites (over 1K sites run FluxBB, over 10K run MyBB and over 100K run XenForo). Nothing huge but the shockwaves seem to be going through the market.

And it was FluxBB which joined Flarum quite a while after it began development not the other way around, although Flarum is so alien compared to FluxBB that 1.x might enter perpetual maintenance.

The thing about Flarum as an end user is that it will be a good alternative to free forum users who have no choice but to use phpBB or MyBB. Which lack a few things for many webmasters of today's age. But sadly Flarum is not stable yet.

You still have to pay for hosting. Also, I recall Cosmic or Lunorian mentioning something about a free hosting tier on Amazon AWS or Google Cloud or something which you might be able to slap a more advanced software on.

I've also heard that Heroku (or one of their competitors, it's been three years since I heard it) has a free package for students. I haven't had the time to follow-up on any of that though.

P.S. I think I fixed your bug.

 

[apaynter]

I believe they are back developing FluxBB so not sure where that leaves Farum with regards to future development.

 

[Ghost]

I recently shared an article that included Flarum as a valid alternative to other forum software.
There are a lot of positive reviews online & their documentation seems nice.
If this is the case, I am a tad embarrassed, but at the end of the day the article was fairly specific about wanting to showcase some lesser known / lesser used forum software instead of focusing on the "big 5" or "big 10" of forum options.

It is very comparable to Discourse, with Discourse obviously being better than Flarum for a lot of reasons, but I don't agree that Flarum is worth trying to forget about entirely.
As for FluxBB & esoTalk - Yeah, Flarum forked off of those / took a lot of concepts and code from those projects as a baseline, so that can be looked at as a good or a bad thing depending on what you think of those original projects. FluxBB does have recent development, so it's possible that they're still working on both or they are just being developed somewhat independently because of their open-source nature.

I think that's why I can't agree with some of your comments. It's an open-source software that is actively being worked on and that gives it a lot of potential. The fact that it does offer so many features (even if it can't fully compete with Discourse) while being relatively new is great. It's also worth noting that almost every summer there has been a slow with Flarum. A lot of the developers working on it have other responsibilities, and for the last 2-3 years there has always been pauses in development around summer & especially after recent releases. I do believe we can expect some major releases come fall 🙂