I’m a newbie to Reclaim Hosting - however I’ve built a phpBB online forum once, many years ago.
I’m wondering what people recommend as the best forum / discussion software that can be used with Reclaim Hosting?
I’d quite like to make a travel advice forum. Ideally I want something that will also display well on a smart phone and something that will not get loads of SPAM.
The trouble I found with phpBB all those years ago was the automated SPAM was very time consuming to deal with.
Hi Dee,
I know there are folks who are fans of Vanilla Forums, which might be worth exploring. A lot of next generation forums are using Discourse, which does not run in Reclaim’s cPanel, but can be setup in Reclaim Cloud. The downside of that forum is it can be a bit more expensive billed monthly, but the upside is it is pretty robust software.
As for other forums, I am not all that sure given phpBB and Discourse are the two I am most familiar with.
Best,
Jim
Yes I also was considering Vanilla forums although was shocked to find out today it’s not been updated in almost 2 years which I find very worrying from both a security and features point of view.
Discourse looks great on a mobile phone - but the whole cloud thing with it’s variable billing seems daunting for something that right now is just a pet project idea …
Dee,
Yeah, not being updated for two years is a huge red flag, so steer clear and thanks for the heads up, I will stop recommending. In that case I think phpBB might be the most tried and true forum, and if it ever blows up and you need something else I imagine there is a migration route to other tools.
I can’t speak of too much experience with Vanilla, and very long ago experience with phpBB – I do see it in use a lot. I’ve done much with Discourse (what this site is running) and it does a lot but the management, setup, customization is a long learning curve.
Avoiding spam might be more a story of what the platform offers for onboarding and moderating new account requests. Most any site where any visitor can create an account to post publicly is susceptible,
Other solutions are using WordPress plugins that turn a site into a forum, or adding it in. I looked at this 2 years ago exploring the ones covered here 10 Best WordPress Forum Plugins (Compared) I found bbPress not usable (but forget why), BuddyPress is probably overkill- the free version of wpForo worked with the project (but then the client decided not to go with it).
I also used Mercury WordPress theme Mercury – WordPress theme | WordPress.org on a project in 2018 - sure it was last updated in 2015, but it worked great (and still does) here https://muraludg.org/contestar/
Hi Everyone,
I don’t think it’s accurate that Vanilla hasn’t been updated in two years.
Looks like they just released a new version 2021.012 on June 15th.
Well I’m going by the date on Installatron
Application Vanilla Forums
Category Forum
Current Versions 3.3
2.8.4
2.1.13
Last Updated 28 October 2019
Hi @Dee
You’re right of course.
It looks like Vanilla changed their numbering paradigm from a version based system to 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 to a year system 2021.021.
I put a bug report in with Installatron and they said a new version of Vanilla will happen with the next update.
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