kono thanks for our chat on Discord.
To summarize a few of the things I said:
Giffgaff is migrating away from Lithium to Flarum. Key figure include 14.3 million posts (others are mentioned in the linked discussion).
Alex Weekes, giffgaff Community Platform Manager:
You may have noticed that we’ve not been referring to the new platform as Vanilla for a while. That’s been deliberate; for a variety of reasons, we’ve mutually agreed to part ways. Vanilla’s core product is an impressive forum platform, however we were unable to find a workable compromise between our differing ways of working that would accommodate giffgaff’s unique requirements.
The one thing I can share about why we are not moving forward with Vanilla is something that applies to all 'commercial with a proven track record' community platforms. That is that they lack the flexibility to allow us to efficiently develop and maintain our own custom solutions, largely because we would always be tied to a core code base that we do not own, and tied to a database that we do not own.
Flarum's out of the box visuals are intentionally very simple and lightweight. It is a relatively trivial thing to do to make changes to the look and feel. What's more important to us at this point is to gather some feedback on features - there's a number of very cool things that Flarum has that won't jump out at you on a simple browse.
Flarum is one of those "robust code, smaller feature set" betas. More accurately, it's one of those beta products where there is still a potential for a major change in some of the underlying structure. That's not a problem for us, however, as we're already aware of the structural change that's proposed and we're providing input on that. And, we'll have full control over when (or even if) we accept that change into our own version of the code.
Read more here: https://community.giffgaff.com/t5/New-Community-Platform/What-s-happening-with-the-new-community-platform/m-p/23254844/highlight/true#M827
There are plenty of other showcases, some of which are already in production, including:
- https://webdeveloper.com with over 1.4 million posts owned by BuySellAds.
- https://together.bunq.com owned by a successful Dutch fintech.
- https://bokt.nl - my employer - in the process of migrating over 100 million posts while keeping current phpBB and new Flarum installation in sync to allow for easier community adoption.
