In this article, we’ll review top 5 Open Source Forum Software for Linux.
A forum is a place for discussion where it is possible to share similar ideas and perspectives on a specific topic. We can use a forum for your site or blog, where your team, customers, fans, patrons, audience, users, advocates, supporters, or friends can hold public or private discussions, as a whole or in smaller groups.
This article will guide you to understand open source forum software for Linux. Some forum applications allow you to setup only a single discussion site on a single installation, while others support multiple-forums for a single installation instance.
Lets get started.
1. phpBB – Bulletin Board Software
phpBB is a free flat-forum bulletin board software solution that can be used to stay in touch with a group of people or can power your entire website. With an extensive database of user-created extensions and styles database containing hundreds of style and image packages to customize your board, you can create a very unique forum in minutes.
It is secure and comes with various tools to protect your forum from unwanted users and spam. It supports: a search system, private messaging, multiple methods of notifying users of forum activities, conversation moderators, and user-groups. Importantly, it has an advanced caching system for increased performance.
2. Simple Machines Forum
Simple Machines Forum(SMF) is all that in one package, giving you an easy to use forum with many powerful features for you as well as your users. SMF is an open-source project made by volunteers from across the world. Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.
SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. SMF features a powerful Package Manager, allowing you to quickly apply any of the hundreds of modifications in our database, as well as a variety of custom themes that change the way your site looks.
3. Discourse Open Source Forum Software for Linux – Discussion Platform
Discourse is a free open source, simple, modern, incredibly powerful and feature-rich community discussion software. It works as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and so much more. Its front-end is built using JavaScript and it is powered by the Ember.js framework; and the server side is developed using Ruby on Rails backed by a PostgreSQL database and Redis cache.
Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern Internet discussion forum should be today, in a world of ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter.
4. bbPress – Forum Software
bbPress is a free open source, simple, lightweight, fast and secure bulletin board software built in a WordPress-fashion. It is easy to install, and configure, fully integrated and supports setting up multiple forums on one site installation.
bbPress is forum software from the creators of WordPress. Quickly setup a place for asyncronous discussion, subscriptions, and more! One central account. One unified admin area. One click install. Divide your site into sections. Allow your users to create content. One of our biggest goals is to keep things simple and make things intuitive. Our dream is that you forget you’re even using the software.
5. Vanilla – Modern Community Forum
Vanilla is an open source, fully-featured, intuitive, robust cloud-based and multi-lingual community forum software. Vanilla gives you fine-grained control of what members can do and what they can see with role based permissions. Use default Roles or create your own using the 30+ permissions that can be set to a Role. Vanilla makes it easy to share great content from your community to social networks – which draws in more people to your community.
Suited for larger communities, this feature lets members form smaller groups where they can hold discussions and schedule events. Groups can be public or private and can be managed by moderators or by the members themselves.
We hope this article will help you to choose one of these open source software for your forum.
In this article, we have seen top 5 Open Source Forum Software for Linux.
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