FOREM Open Source Forum Software

[Ravenfreak]

There's a new free open source forum software called FOREM software that I came across while browsing another webmaster forum. From a member standpoint, it gives me social media vibes specifically Facebook vibes. According to the developers, it's a difficult software to set up properly, so if you're up for a challenge and want to try it out here's their link. There is a waiting list for those wanting to sign up for their cloud hosting services instead of self hosting, though I'm not sure when this will launch.
https://www.forem.com/

 

[Arantor]

It's a Rails app with some bits on the side and instead of using Docker to manage this like their weight-class peers (notably Discourse which also uses Ruby, and some of the same components like Sidekiq) they've gone straight to Ansible playbooks and aiming at not-even-VPS cloud compute.

Not the way I would have gone about it; if I had a need to host it inhouse for whatever reason (let's say enterprise with a healthy dislike of SaaS offerings), this is a far *far* higher barrier to clear than Discourse's Docker setup. I'm honestly surprised this isn't packaged as a Docker for developer use to be honest and for test driving it, but if this is their self hosting playbook, chances are this is distilled down from their managed environment.

It's one of the things makes me die a little inside when I see people talking about IPS cloud as if it's just some servers and a PHP app dropped on it - everything about the features withheld from self-host there are the kinds of things that the rest of this stuff supports here, and trying to host this yourself is like trying to self host *the entire IPS stack*, not just the bits currently available to the self-hosted folks, this is the sort of stuff that powers live topics.

As for the offering itself, it feels like a social network in presentation rather than a forum. If anything it resembles a more bland Twitter with some notion of 'entity pages' akin to company or organisation pages. I don't know, it feels very corporate to me and so far I'm not getting the sense that it feels good to go find things in.

 

[Jason]

Well, they do have a witty name for sure. Anyway, though, I see they 900K registered users already. In that case, they've done good so far.