Thought I'd do a semi/intro / what I've experienced with Flarum, having been 'on the scene' with forums for too long time (I used to have hair!!)
History
I started off like most with Proboards, followed by IkonBoard, then MyBB, vBulletin and finally XenForo. Then a stint on Discourse and... back to XenForo.
That forum went from 2005-2013, and was semi-resurrected in 2019 and remains (VERY slowly) growing and activeish. At the moment it remains on XenForo but I will be very seriously thinking about taking the plunge to Flarum (anyone else done this switch?)
I've done a fair few mods/plugins/extensions, some even released, and even ran a free forum host way back when (can't even remember what it was called now but it was phpBB).
Now
Flarum has been on my radar and I thought about switching for a long time before... not doing so. It's no mean feat changing forum software and after getting completely burned by my user base not particularly enjoying Discourse, I'm reluctant to.
But with my anti spam project Forum Fortress, of course it's important to support the major platforms - I've pretty much got all of the PHP ones nailed as PHP is in my comfort zone (though Github Copilot does a LOT of the hard work these days and AI helps me write a lot better documentation than I could pull off).
Flarum has by far been the easiest system to work with - to the point where I've switched the 'golden child' plugin on which all features get deved first to Flarum from XenForo.
The community? Much more friendly than the folks over at XenForo.
The software? Pretty much I'd sum it up like this: Probably what Discourse should have been. Modern enough to not feel dated, but still recognisable as a forum platform.
Discourse came out while everyone was raving about Ruby being the future, PHP being history and yet here we are.
It's nice that it can run in shared hosting, because for a lot of people that takes away a massive sysadmin/cost burden.
I hope to be able to contribute positively to the community and maybe if brave enough submit a PR or two.
Another forum project is on the horizon for me and the software decision is probably the easiest one for me to make 🙂
