I use Forumotion

[The Raven92]

XenForo is super expensive, yes! But still I'd much rather go for a plain old phpBB, NodeBB or MyBB installation on my own hosting rather than using Forumotion. That way I still get all the control over my own board, and the ability to move to another forum software at a later time.

Wait, let's assume I see some free hosting and free domain that hosting offers as a starting point, how would I use one of these:

The extensible community framework - Flarum

Free, open-source forum software built by the community. Beautiful, fast, and extensible — made for communities of all sizes.

flarum.org

Higher Logic Vanilla | B2B/B2C Customer Community Software

Explore Higher Logic Vanilla, our all-in-one customer community software designed to help you and your customers succeed. Discover features, benefits, and FAQs.

vanilla.higherlogic.com

https://www.discourse.org/ (most important one)

 

[Varlot]

Wait, let's assume I see some free hosting and free domain that hosting offers as a starting point, how would I use one of these:

The extensible community framework - Flarum

Free, open-source forum software built by the community. Beautiful, fast, and extensible — made for communities of all sizes.

flarum.org

Higher Logic Vanilla | B2B/B2C Customer Community Software

Explore Higher Logic Vanilla, our all-in-one customer community software designed to help you and your customers succeed. Discover features, benefits, and FAQs.

vanilla.higherlogic.com

https://www.discourse.org/ (most important one)

• Flarum is installed through the use of a tool called Composer. In order to use composer you need SSH-access to your hosting server. So, if the hosting you end up using gives you SSH-access, you should be able to install Flarum.
• Not really familiar with Higher Logic Vanilla, and didn't find an answer on their website, so can't help you there.
• I'm pretty sure Discourse requires a VPS or dedicated server.

 

[The Raven92]

Okay, thanks for info. 😀

 

[The Raven92]

Forumotion has for a year a new version called AwesomeBB. It is mobile friendly, responsive and much better than previous versions. The limitations I think it has is you being unable to use forum images / topic images for old, new, hot but they give you from material icons. You can alter that with JS but it's annoying. Almost everything is made out of divs and much simplefied.

So, I am trying to test out this version and its limitations. But overall I like it because of being minimalistic and responsive.

 

[sethlindsay]

I feel like Forumotion is really easy to use, especially when you just want to try to create a forum, but personally I had some technical issues while using it

 

[Mike30]

If you get a strong fan base, they won't mid transfering to better solution without threads if they love community. So, that's something at least, right? 😀

Many times people follow to the new forum if you are able to transfer their content. Remember, their content is their time invested in the forum. Your closest friends/fans will follow you, but I don't think that most of your users will follow.
That's why is important for you to be able to own your forum's data.
If you have a long vision for your community, I would not recommend not to own your data.
If it's for pure fun, easy start process and experiment to start a community, then it doesn't matter that much what you use.