why flarum?

andrewjs18

as someone who isn't using flarum yet, but has spent around $800-900 between a custom theme, contributing to having the newly released trader feedback extension built and some custom migration work, I'm still not 100% sold on using flarum.

so I ask, why flarum?

why flarum over discourse?

why flarum over nodebb?

why flarum over xenforo?

I haven't seen a lot of development activity over the last say 4-6 months and there's very little discussion on the open forum here about continuing to push flarum forward. There's also almost no one that is developing extension and themes for flarum - a real problem, in my opinion, given how flarum ships out of the box pretty lean in terms of its feature set.

why should I spend $500-800 more dollars to have extensions and modifications built and open sourced back to flarum to bring my forum over? I have a large forum with about ₆₀₀,000 posts.

luceos

andrewjs18 I haven't seen a lot of development activity over the last say 4-6 months and there's very little discussion on the open forum here about continuing to push flarum forward.

There are a handful of reasons for this.

Version 1.8 is stable now, it doesn't need that much effort anymore.
Version 2.x is underway, but most of the effort now lies in updating community extensions. Core developers usually also have their own extensions that need to be made compatible with this new version. This implies we need to fully understand the changes, and implement them to do so. I'm currently working on the Payments extensions upgrade, having completed the 2.x version of Realtime. Together with @IanM I have started the task of upgrading extensions for discuss.flarum.org for 2.x so that we can update it ahead of a release. Activity now happens mostly outside of the software itself.
Open source development is about the voluntary participation of people to move something forward. But those people also need to make a living, or finish studies, or become parents. A small project like ours is heavily influenced by the limited availability of these amazing people. With our eyes locked on 2.0, a lot of people have reduced their participation in the meantime. Only last month did we start rebuilding our staff team again, to vacate positions and understand what positions are in need of replacement.

Steper

luceos Hi luceos,

I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude and support for your contributions to the Flarum community. Your insights and experience are invaluable, and I appreciate the time you take to share your knowledge with others.

I understand the challenges of maintaining a project like Flarum, especially when it comes to development and community engagement. Your dedication to keeping the project moving forward is truly commendable.

Thank you for all you do for the Flarum community!

KBExit

I've tried Discourse many times. Even tried other forum software like: vBulletin, XenForo, phpBB, MyBB, SMF, and IPB in the past.
Flarum hits right where I want it. Sure it has certain limitations, but it holds an edge over Discourse for one: It's more lightweight. A Flarum instance with 100,000 users on a 2 Core 2GB Server will fly in comparison to Discourse, that would require double the resources. It's budget friendly on the admins.
The other softwares are outdated. In their current state, they were suitable for the early 2000s, nowadays, Flarum and Discourse like instances are all the buzz. Better streamlining of conversations, instead of compartmentalizing discussions and trying to find things that way.
If your forum is having issues with the search function, there is an extension to better serve that. I think it's only a slight nuance if anything. You can also isolate searches to a specific domain on google and search topics that way.

Walys

andrewjs18 Why Flarum? For me, it’s simple: light and modern software. More than Discourse, which in my opinion is the only real comparable one. The others, as another user mentioned, look old.

I like the small project with a good roadmap. It’s true that the project is growing little by little, but I don’t need more than that. Having a stable and error-free environment is enough — everything else will be welcome.

The only thing I would change is the issue with the main extensions that have the most downloads. They should become part of the core, or FOF should take care of maintaining them, since I think it’s a problem when they suddenly stop being updated because the author is busy with other things.

zannauvoak

@andrewjs18
So far, I’ve spent $45 on AI tools to help develop extensions for my Flarum forum and $43.44 on VPS hosting (24 GB RAM, 20 cores, 280 GB NVMe SSD, and 7 TB bandwidth).
I also spent $7.11 on the email domain and $9.23 on the main .com domain, both valid for one year.

These expenses cover the first month of operation, during which the forum has reached the following metrics:

Users: 2.5K

Discussions: 18.2K

Posts: 295.1K

Despite the progress, there are still some challenges. One of them is the pagination implementation, which has proven more complex than expected. Another issue comes from Flarum’s native behavior — when replying to a topic, the page automatically scrolls to the bottom. This becomes frustrating in long threads, as finding your previous position can be tricky even with the navigation bar.
Ideally, after submitting a reply, the view should remain where the user left off instead of jumping to the end of the page.

Another major challenge is realtime functionality, which caused several issues. Fortunately, I managed to work around it by developing a custom websocket from scratch.
Still, I believe that with time, these aspects will naturally improve as the platform evolves.

andrewjs18

1: understood

2: thank you. I saw that a thread was created shortly after my thread here (I think) that showed the progress of getting extensions updated and what's needed for them. I appreciate that.

3: of course. I think I was just looking for some communication from the team as to what has been going on. I'm spending money on custom flarum extensions to help improve the flarum ecosystem to improve adoption. I'd just like to know that I'm not wasting my time and money there.

SHANKS

Simplifying script features can sometimes lead to decreased usability and limitations.