Im gonna have to move away from Flarum. While Flarum is a unique, different piece of software, it has a critical flaw, in that it does not represent the desires of the end user.
Noone navigates to a forum because they want to "see a forum". You go to a forum because you have a topic at mind, and you would like to follow discussion, or community around that topic.
Say you like pineapples. You search for pineapples, and find a forum of people talking and discussing all things pineapples. You expect it to be laid out in a certain convention that is familiar, and function as you are used to. But no, this pineapple forum uses Flarum. You, as a user, are not accustomed to the completely different organization of topics, and radical changes in convention that this website uses compared to all the other forums you have used. It makes no sense to you, and you don't care at all what the developers vision or thought process was. You only wanted to talk pineapples, and you thought that you would be comfortable doing so on this site. This didn't happen, because the forum software that was chosen tried to break conventions and be different. All this really just doesn't matter to you.
That being said, the core flaw with Flarum is that it really considers forum owners, webmasters, and tech savvy software enthusiasts as their users. Unfortunately this completely overlooks the real users of a forum, the visitors: people with accounts, posting and reading discussions about pinapples. Nothing that Flarum tries to offer (besides looks) matters to these real users.
This isn't even including the oversights that Flarum has made on the backend for webmasters. Lack of any real means to manage users is abysmal. Customizability isn't as good as it should be, even with all the extensions available. I'm saying this after about 7 months of operating a forum on Flarum. Even many basic features, such as private messaging remain unimplemented. I expected many of my issues to be resolved through extensions, but this just hasn't been the case. What is even more frustrating is the fact that most of the extensions that did the thing I wanted them to do were outdated and incompatible, nearly every time. LTS for extensions is practically nonexistent, making them virtually useless long term.
I'm not sure where the developers heads are at, and this is not meant to be a toxic post. I really think that the developers need to reevaluate the priorities of this software, or else it will surely die. Once again, the end user doesnt give a sh*t about all the cool ways that Flarum is trying to revolutionize forums. They didnt come to your forum for that, they came to talk pineapples, not be confused by broken conventions. I started using Flarum because I think it looks great from a visual perspective. Unfortunately I have found over the last half of a year+, there is no substance beyond this facade, and I can not tell you the amount of times I have had to field questions and support from users because of the inherently convoluted way the software works.
To be clear none of this is to knock the developers, I understand that this is all hard work. I just want to share my opinion regarding my switch, to hopefully better Flarum in the longrun
Thank you for listening to my two cents.
TLDR:
Flarum ignores the real users of a forum, and instead caters to software enthusiasts and webmasters. Functionality via extensions seems promising, but does not pan out in the real world (I gave it 7 months before giving up). Extension LTS is nonexistent as well, making most moot. No priority has been given to improving basic functionality as well. Flarum starts and ends with "its a pretty, unique forum software".
