Simple Machines Forum VS nodeBB

Do yourself a favor and avoid SMF if possible. It "works", but has terrible code quality (prime example [1]) and the addon/module system operates by diffing the original PHP source file and then patching in the needed changes. As you can imagine, this quickly leads to a lot of issues when updating or using multiple addons.

[1] https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/blob/release-2.1/So...

> I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/

TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.

Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).

NodeBB

You said it's based on. This means that there are modifications to the implementation of nodebb. So where is your modifications' source code then? stackfoss/stackfoss is just a single readme file

Obviously forums aren't as popular as they used to be, so this topic might not be of interest to many. For folks that want to run a forum, they'd most certainly go with Discourse (Ruby), Flarum (PHP), Xenforo (PHP), NodeBB (Javascript), Nimforum (Nim) and maybe Casnode (Go)

If you want to make your own app out of custom code that you will actively develop new features for, I think your points are true. But if you just wanted a modern version of the old phpBB forums, there are plenty of almost-turnkey projects/templates you can use. Check out NodeBB for instance. Maybe the barrier for entry is higher in a way, given increased complexity, but you also get more and nicer features "for free". I think it's a wash.

I was looking into actively maintained Rust based forum software similar to NodeBB (Node.js) or Discourse (Ruby on Rails) and Flaskbb (Python).

package: name: nodebb version: 2.5.3 dependencies: runtime: - nodejs environment: contents: packages: - alpine-baselayout - ca-certificates-bundle - nodejs - npm - git pipeline: - uses: fetch with: uri: https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/archive/refs/tags/v${{package.version}}.tar.gz expected-sha256: 92e390d7cda190e7f098833cbbbf03fbe1c50f25653656ad589ae97dc18a7684 strip-components: 0 - runs: | mkdir -p "${{targets.destdir}}/usr/share/nodebb" cd NodeBB-${{package.version}} cp install/package.json . npm install --omit=dev cp -a ./. "${{targets.destdir}}/usr/share/nodebb"