Is this forum worth it?

Frink

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

bkolobara

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.

Franz

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

jordanjay29

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.

Pollux

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.

LewisScales

bkolobara Thanks for this. This definitely puts things in perspective for me and I think I may switch over to Discourse

luceos

jordanjay29 feature for split extension to duplicate into its own discussion ?

Frink

luceos Or duplicate one post

Zeokat

@Prosperous If he checks the "Showcase your Flarum!", the stats says nothing good about Flarum. Only 25 forums alive and some of them apparently installed for testing purposes.

Prosperous

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.

jordanjay29

Zeokat If someone were to go through them and Flag all the showcase posts that are 404 links, I'd be happy to remove them from view.

Prosperous

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.

Victor12

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.