dismalbliss

It really depends on what bells and whistles you want. I've seen open source forums that all look the same - boring. And then I have seen others where it was very well done theme and appearance-wise. I started with open source called Phorum but the project was abandoned by it's devs. When shared hosting kicked me off and I upgraded to a VPS, the software broke because it wasn't up to date with the newer technology on the new server. So we migrated to Invision and never looked back.

I agree with this. If you want to start small with as little startup costs as possible, register a domain, point it to a cheap shared hosting provider, and use a free script like MyBB, phpBB, SMF, or Flarum. Then as you get more popular you can migrate to paid software, which is Invision, Woltlab, VBulletin, and (sorta semi-abandoned) Xenforo.

Wow. I hate the Xenforo editor. Maybe it's just because I am so used to CKEditor instead. The CKEditor in IPS is version 4. I believe CKEditor official is now on their 5th iteration.

I would like to see a 3rd party developer create a courses or live topics app for self-hosted clients.

My communities have tried to back away from the word "forum" for several years now. It's still used here and there, but we prefer to have a Community, Community Leaders, Community Membership Policy, etc.

I hate it. I've been on a forum where they have an AI plugin that generates replies from fake AI members. It's so stupid. I also hate it when I see a real human member paste an AI response. You can spot it a mile away, lol.

We allow it in our communities. It doesn't bother me when a member uses one, UNLESS the title is nothing but an emoji, then I will change the title to have some contextual substance.

I tried a chat room once. It got a little traffic but most of the members stayed in the forums. I would rather this be the case anyway, because forum posts feed the hungry Google Bot whereas chat conversations don't. What we do now is host Zoom meetings several nights a week. The face to face interaction is much better than the old text chat of yesteryear.

I've been with KnownHost for almost a decade using a managed VPS. Their support is great, which I lean on if I am tinkering and screw something up, lol.

I think he means 3rd party apps.

I don't think this is possible. However, the user could upload the video to a private Gallery Album, and share that Album with only the administrator or anyone else of his choosing. My users upload videos to their gallery or to forum posts and they play right there just fine. I think a basic embedded media player is built into most browsers. I don't think this would be necessary. It will either play in browser or you could download it. Creating a PM and linking to the video file is easy enough. The automated ticket can't happen out of the box. A Provider might be able to write a script to add this functionality. Another alternative is to have a forum where the user can only see posts that he himself started. He (or an Admin/coach logged in as him) could start a Topic and paste the link to his video to get the conversation started. So out of the box, Gallery could sorta be used for this situation. OR a forum could be used for this situation, with everything taking place in a thread that only the one user can see. I think the latter would be easier.

Both my boards default to the traditional forum view. But members have the option of changing the appearance themselves. On my large successful board, we have a lot of forums and subforums, so the traditional view makes the most sense. On my newer board, I have a Recent Topics widget above the traditional table layout, so attention can be draw to the activity that is taking place.

It's not a big problem yet. Usually if someone posts a reply that is obviously AI generated, another user calls him out on it, lol.

Pessimist! 😆 I don't think we have anything to worry about. The new license pricing structure was designed/intended for moving forward with v5. I think Pages including it's new features will still be part of the self-hosted product. Things like Lessons/Courses are added functionality, like a plugin or app. Pages is Pages and while an overhaul will probably streamline it's use and hopefully make it more understandable for the beginner, it's still Pages in the end.

I know what you are saying. A lot of people start a forum that looks like the old Yahoo or DMOZ directory, with a forum for every imaginable category. I prefer to stick to specific niche forums with a few forums related to that niche, and maybe just one "general" forum for those who want to talk off-topic.

But some are easily upgraded while others may be dead moving forward. I'm not a dev, but I was speaking to one who was very uncertain about his apps that relied heavily on hooks.

I have 2 communities. One is "dependent" on 3rd party apps/plugins and the other one isn't. I will probably upgrade the one that isn't right away, and then see if the 3rd party app devs are going to make their apps compatible with v5 or not.

I have 2 niche communities. The one has been around since 2006 and over the years we have created a ton of forums and subforums to cover a wide array of topics, but most people still come for the niche content. My latest fledgling project is also a niche forum. We have a general discussion area, but this niche is much narrower and I don't foresee ever branching out as much as the first one.

You should enable this. If you look closely, everybody is putting their personal websites and communities under the "Profile URL" because it get's displayed under their avatars, whereas Community URL's don't, and you have Signatures disabled. I'm about to do the same, lol 😉

This is hard for me to answer since I haven't used free forum software in 10-15 years. But I have fiends who use SMF, MyBB, and phpBB, and Discourse. They all get the job done and as a user it probably doesn't matter. I do think the forum experience improves when you move onto paid software though.

Build for all of it. Gallery, Downloads, Pages, Events. Your community can be both a social gathering and an information hub. This is why I like "community" software over just "forums"

We've done this with my large community, but we've also had 17 years to perfect it. We dumped Clubs, don't use Commerce, and have been selective with our 3rd party apps. Can't get Blogs off the ground either so we will probably remove them too, lol.

You and I are on a few of the same communities that are basically clones of each other. And it's the same cast of characters posting the same topics across all of them too. They are basically general discussion forums with a category for almost everything. Now granted, my largest community is similar, but we target a niche audience. My fledgling community is a support community concentrated to a specific niche.

Depends. If they impressed within a topic, I will praise them in that topic. If they Reported something, I will thank them via PM.

My old successful community is set up for perpetual existence. The fellow admins have my usernames and passwords. All they would do is have to update payment methods. This is the ONE circumstance that makes going to Community on the Cloud somewhat appealing, as the rest of the Admin team may not have the computer geek skills that I do, lol.