For a new forum I was investigating new forum software options. I was open to any software language but I wanted to host the software myself and be able to customize it to my likings, so offerings tied to specific hosting solutions weren't considered.
Furthermore I am an advocate of the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.
I want a forum software to concentrate on the content and not distract from it by means of an overflow of unimportant statistical data (registration date, number of posts, and some other kind of merits of the poster, signatures, topic views etc.) So the initial visual appeal was important to me. I prefer to add the functions I need instead of removing those I don't want, as the latter way usually results in a slower software more difficult to handle.
After my first round of research, there were three softwares I had a closer look at: Flarum, NodeBB and Discourse. Discourse is the one made the most fuss about everywhere, so it was a natural candidate. I learned to know about single-page applications, learned to like the idea, and that there are not so many softwares out there going that route.
The next question was: How difficult are these softwares to install locally, so I could test them more thoroughly, and what are the requirements on rented remote hardware (e.g. shared hosting). After a short while I realised that Discourse was not for me. The requirements were high and many times I heard the recommendation to go with their paid hosting, but that wasn't what I was looking for. It seemed to me as if paid hosting was their main interest and their open source commitment didn't have a high priority.
Then I installed both of Flarum and NodeBB locally and played around with them. I wanted to find out how difficult it was to change the software to my likings. And here Flarum won by a mile. I first concentrated on visual aspects I could easily access by CSS, and here already Flarum was much cleaner. And it continued with the writing style of the software itself. Even though writing extensions the way Flarum uses them is still a challenge to me, I could see the vast possibilities in them due to a clean organisation of the logics of the core software.
And finally: the community around the software. If people are enthusiastic about a software you can usually feel that in their community, so this aspect was an important indicator for me not only for practical considerations.
And this enthusiasm has finally hit me as well, as you can see.
