almost 8 years ago from Benjamin Christine, Head of Design
I'm searching the web for a nicely designed forum... And in all honesty forums are evil things, but surely we can design one well?
Any help would be great.
Thanks
I quite like http://www.discourse.org/ nice, flat and simple. Ionic uses it as well.
Discourse is great. If you want to see what it's like in practice, check out to the Atom forum. https://discuss.atom.io/
I host a forum on discourse, and love how it performs and some of the advanced stuff it does. But I find the interface to be really busy and lack hierarchy. I bounce off the main interface pretty hard because all the controls and buttons outnumber and distract from the actual content. Which would be an easy fix but it's pretty impossible to actually customize (beyond what you can do in their admin interface).
Not sure of the current state of development but Flarum looked to be an interesting option (successor to Esotalk). http://flarum.org
these guys look really nice
I can vouch for Flarum! We're currently working with the Flarum guys on a custom build for a project, and they're absolutely rad to work with.
Vanilla Forums is probably the best solution I've used. Very simple to use, customizable, and has a great community of developers.
Vanilla allows you to make a nicely designed one, some great examples – as well as some bad ones too though.
really interesting. cheers
SketchTalk (http://sketchtalk.io) runs on Vanilla. It was very easy to set-up, customize and deploy. And there's a free Open Source version.
NodeBB ! https://nodebb.org/
Good community, responsive, fast, frequently updated, etc., etc.,
second for NodeBB. i used it a year or so ago for a project. we no longer run it, but i found it perfect for our needs.
I think it depends on what sort of forum you're trying to build. A lot of the more nice-looking, minimalist options here (Discourse, especially) seem like they would be great for something more ephemeral and impersonal like a technical support forum, but I've yet to see a real community spring up around anything other than vBulletin, ugly as it is.
I think there's a reason all the largest forum communities (Something Awful, Bodybuilding.com, NeoGAF, Facepunch...) have stuck with it. It's familiar to previous forum users, and its social features are just unmatched by everything else.
I really like hacker news. It's pure HTML, very confortable imho.
IWC's official forums are pretty good.
I made this site with my own design: Responsate which is not really a traditional forum, but has blogposts, shared links, questions and answers.
I also like the design and the features of discourse.org.
https://omegaforums.net/ is custom built and has some really nice features.
I really like the forums on Webflow, lots of nice details http://forum.webflow.com/
Edit: I think they are using discourse!
Coursera's recently updated their forums (if you login and join the course): https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/discussions?sort=lastActivityAtDesc&page=1
It's mostly a template, but https://forum.sectioneighty.com/ has the best forum UX I've used. Warning: It's a Hip Hop board.
The concept of a forum is hard to design well, especially on mobile.
Similar question: Do you know any forums, connected with upcoming apps, or any community of productive people?
does producthunt count?
Yes I have, but... Im looking for new beta testers (we have about 300 now), and I want to post it there when will be official release, it gives us more publicity i guess.
Forums over at Macrumors are nicely designed & responsive - http://forums.macrumors.com/
I find forums rather challenging, as they try to create a connection between the old platforms and some new service. I think Quora works quite well, even though it probably isn't a forum in itself.
The PCPartPicker Forums are simple, easy-to-use and well-executed.
I went with Muut which I found was best suited for the neeeds of my client which were pretty basic. We wanted a pretty looking responsive forum that's easy to use, cheap to maintain and fast to try just to test whether the users actually want to use a forum or not.
Also it's from Finland :)
esotalk.org
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