kimchoson Progress is definitely being made almost every day. You can track it all yourself by checking out the milestones on GitHub. Just because you cannot see progress doesn't mean it isn't happening. ?

And don't rely on third parties for information either. Just like magazine articles and newspaper reports; they're the opinions and assumptions of the author at the time. If you see it announced by a developer or other Flarum staff member, then take that as gospel.

To answer your question on whether Flarum is worth it, well, my question to you is why wouldn't it be?

Yes it is new forum software to hit the market and there are many others out there that are already well established but different software suits different forum owners and administrators. Choose a forum software based on what you want to get out of it and whether it serves your purpose or meets your audience. Extension updates and new releases are currently on hold until beta.8 is released but once it launches you will have access to a vast array of them to improve what is already an awesome bit of kit. You can check out what our members have created in the Showcase your Flarum! discussion for some influence or if you need some reassurance. Some people are quite creative in getting Flarum to work the way they want it to.

Flarum is here to stay and won't be a project that is simply abandoned. There are some very smart individuals who are working together to bring you some powerful forum software that can be moulded to suit any type of community or project. Try it and see for yourself. Only then will you know whether Flarum is the right fit for you.

      luceos They both made perfect sense. Your's didn't appear rushed, and it made perfect sense. @Prosperous just expanded on your post

        kimchoson As someone who runs a medium sized deployment of flarum (2.000+ users) for 2 years this are some of my thoughts about the biggest pain points:

        • After running your forum for a long time you will run into bugs. For me it was the javascript markdown parser failing and my users losing the possibility to edit their posts. Or this other time when I added a new extension and everything failed. This will require you to manually edit the database or php files and work around it. You will not be able to find solutions by googling it and will need to debug it on your own. If I didn't have a technical background I would have probably given up on flarum a long time ago, but this is what you need to expect from beta quality software.

        • Spam protection is not that great. I had so many problems with scammers and spammers and I just don't have the right tools with flarum to fight them. To have a simple option "Require every first post to be manually approved" would have saved me many sleepless nights.

        • SEO sucks. I run the biggest forum in my domain and I get outranked by low quality sites, even I'm full of great content and have a tone of backlinks by key players. Somehow google keeps punishing me more for better content and I just keep ranking worse.

        I still have a lot of hope for flarum and can see that there are many great new things coming in beta8, but I believe that it will still be challenging using flarum for a production forum.

            bkolobara SEO sucks. I run the biggest forum in my domain and I get outranked by low quality sites, even I'm full of great content and have a tone of backlinks by key players. Somehow google keeps punishing me more for better content and I just keep ranking worse.

            Feel free to get in touch to let us know about the exact problems you are having. Some of them should be fixed in beta8. If you are using Google's Webmaster Console, you can use that to drill down into the exact problems they're noticing.

            back on topic now, sorry

              bkolobara Would you be willing to post that in a separate discussion so we can link it for other users who want to know? I'd love that to be in our FAQ tag, but not when it's buried in a discussion like this.

                  Zeokat I was leaning more towards looking through that discussion in particular for some live forums that can provide him with a bit of a creative idea of what Flarum can do and what it can look like, not purely on a stats perspective but I get your point I guess.

                  Having said that, this forum itself is an example of what it can be and how it can support a live environment. Whilst we run the latest possible code, it still shows that it can support a community. We may be the official support forum, but that shouldn't take away from how it actually performs with the number of members it has using it daily.

                    bkolobara To have a simple option "Require every first post to be manually approved" would have saved me many sleepless nights.

                    I'm not so sure this would keep spammers away. They would probably find out quite soon, that they need a warm-up post before they can fire off their spam.

                    I think it would be more efficiant to disallow freshly registered users to post links or anything that looks like a URL. This would be an interesting proposal for an extension. And then there could be an interesting extension that automatically promotes a user depending on certain stats. Both combined could fight a lot of spam.

                      4 months later

                      LewisScales Bear in mind that that post was from five months ago and on the beta.7 release. There have been quite a few changes since that may have fixed the issues initially mentioned, especially with the most recent beta.8 release.

                      Not to mention a patch in the works that is set to be released very soon.

                        LewisScales That is your choice, but after being a Discourse user for 7 months, I’d tell you it’s not only rainbows and unicorns, as it seems. A proud Flarum user now. Beta 8 is great and we are already in production.