[Insalgo]

Any recommendations for a free engineering community forum?

[mikl]

https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere.

They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.

[542458]

I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered.

Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.

[Vvector]

$50/month for the basic hosted option. Self-hosting requires skills and resources not available to everyone. It's very easy (and free) to start on Discord. Then if it takes off, there is too much friction to move to Discourse.

[chrisjj]

Discourse seems great until it isn't. E.g. sticks on a unremovable banner obscuring your content.

[Groxx]

> Managed forum hosting from $50/month

Yeowch. $50/mo is a huge cost for anything that's not making money.

[poulpy123]

Discourse is nice but only orga making money can use it

[kaathewise]

I haven't self-hosted any, but I enjoy using Flarum [0] forums. They load faster than Discourse ones and feel snappy.

[0]: https://flarum.org/

[jslakro]

https://github.com/flarum/flarum (PHP) https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB (js)

[alanbernstein]

phpBB

[eviks]

that's the one without per-post reactions and a weird markup language builtin?

[yownv]

SimpleMachineForum