help with Pillowfort's Web Discussions forum

[boreal cryptid]

due to oncoming Pillowfort's shutdown (December 4th, 2026), the members of WebDiscussions community suggested to create a wiki and a forum. TL;DR: any person experienced in hosting and/or maintaining forums needed 

what we already have:

• some possible options: phpBB, MyBB, folk.zone or Simple Machines
• ruled out Proboards
• iffy on Discourse

if you can respond in under Pillowfort post itself, it would be most preferable way! but this thread works, too.

any advises or propositions are welcome, especially if you have any experience with abovementioned engines!

[Loebas]

Forumwise. I would go with phpBB, or simple machines forum.

phpBB is around for 25 years nowm and still going, it has a big community around it, and a lots of extensions that gives your forum a lot of additional features. It has also a lot of custom themes. It also has responsive design out of the box, so it looks nice on smartphones.
phpBB even has a demo installation where you can try out the basic things

Simple Machines Forum (this forum runs it), is also very populair, and is in my opionion easy to modify. Like phpBB it has a lot extensions, and themes available for it.
For example, i wanted to add additional colors to its editor. It turns out you can do this by editing a single php file.

All of this will run on a shared host unlike discourse, which needs full server access, and cannot be installed on a shared host.
Also i dont like discourse, it does not have this homey feeling other forums have.

[Rubbereon]

phpBB is around for 25 years nowm and still going, it has a big community around it, and a lots of extensions that gives your forum a lot of additional features. It has also a lot of custom themes. It also has responsive design out of the box, so it looks nice on smartphones.

imo, if that's the only selling point of phpBB then they might as well use Xenforo because it's practically the same thing, except it looks more modern. Only downside is that it costs money unlike phpBB.

Anyway to answer the topic, I've never used pillowfort so I'm gonna reply here instead, simplemachines seems to be the best fit for what they're trying to do and also DO NOT USE DISCOURSE UNDER ANY PRETEXT, NEVER USE IT. It is the epitomy of that one scene from robots.

Discourse has 0 personality and I don't know why 32-bit café even chose it for their yesterweb forum, it looks ugly.

I would also recommend acmlmboards because it has many cool additional features like a mock-up rpg level system and exactly like melonland it has ranks, but those ranks also have an accompanying image. This might be too niche for pillowfort and the copyright is not clearly labeled so I'm tossing it as something they should consider and nothing more than that, I plan to use it for my future forum though.

[Rubbereon]

For a wiki, the option I'm inclined to go with is Miraheze.

Uh, can somebody with a pillowfort account warn them that Miraheze is not exactly the best choice? The community over there caused a huge drama around I reckon 2020 and the moderators don't seem really helpful from what I've heard. Plus, I don't like centralized communities (read: reddit, discord and proboards which they apparently don't like anyway), I believe decentralized communities like the fediverse are somewhat better, so if they can they would get more outta going self-hosted.

[boreal cryptid]

Uh, can somebody with a pillowfort account warn them that Miraheze is not exactly the best choice? The community over there caused a huge drama around I reckon 2020 and the moderators don't seem really helpful from what I've heard. Plus, I don't like centralized communities (read: reddit, discord and proboards which they apparently don't like anyway), I believe decentralized communities like the fediverse are somewhat better, so if they can they would get more outta going self-hosted.

could you please provide more specific information about it? :0

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

While I don't have any information regarding Miraheze, I can tell you that I had a PMWiki running on a server for several years - it worked very well for me, although I imagine it might be difficult when many people are involved - but there are also more elaborate Wikis that only need php/MySQL - so, if you have a server where you can host a forum, you can also host your own Wiki.

The last forum I hosted myself was a MyBB. Again, it worked well for what we did with it (intern board for a small rpg group); it was very easy to configure. It also seems to get regular updates. But there are certainly people more experienced than me when it comes to hosting web boards ;).

One last thing: It might be wise to set up a xampp (or just get a small webserver) and test different softwares. Setting up the forums and wikis that come into question is done within an afternoon, and than you and your friends can just checkout and decide what fits for you.

[Rubbereon]

could you please provide more specific information about it? :0

Do you mean, everything I said in my comment? 

Around 2020, fandom/wikia started banning a lot of wikis and pouring in a whole lot more invasive ads so people (mostly kids) left for miraheze and they brought with them their wikis, some of which are really nasty like there was an entire umbrella term for wikis dedicated to talking about other people, the reception wikis which are still around but a lot of them got closed for example atrocious youtubers wiki. They're not even well-written to begin with. Anyhow they eventually got so bad that the whole platform had a large scale drama causing editors and other staff members to leave.

Couldn't find a better explanation online, so that's as good as it gets as to why they're a problem.
https://medium.com/@slated856/miraheze-reception-wikis-the-next-safe-space-for-anti-sjws-f698e8f9ebc
Yeah it's Medium I know. 

Mods did nothing to deal with those wikis and I heard from somebody who used miraheze that when they had a problem with their own (non-reception) wiki the miraheze staff did not try to help them whatsoever, they seem to prioritize large wikis on their platform like the nonbinary wiki. So on top of all that there is favoritism.

Lastly, unrelated to miraheze itself is my comment about centralized communities. When you sign up to a wiki on Miraheze (or any other wiki farms, see Fandom, shoutwiki, wikidot, wiki.gg and gamepedia for that matter) you sign up to the whole network just like how you sign up to reddit or discord to use the subreddits/servers so you are putting pressure on your users who may not sign up just because you use miraheze (in fact they can't if they were banned due to something that happened earlier on, lots of kids who were on those reception wikis are banned from miraheze for acting like kids, they're immature) and that also means you are subject to their arbitrary rules or lack thereof (you do as well if you are not self-hosted and rely on let's say Amazon, but imo that's a step up because you're not sharing a space with problematic wikis) and generally I dislike centralization, especially if the platform is large enough, and miraheze IS large enough, this is also a reason why I use nekoweb and not neocities because genuinely this stuff is what ruined the internet, I prefer decentralization like what's been done via the fediverse.

It's kind of like using ai chatbots, it's not very ethical even if there's nothing immediately wrong with it.

[Seechain]

I agree with this.

One last thing: It might be wise to set up a xampp (or just get a small webserver) and test different softwares. Setting up the forums and wikis that come into question is done within an afternoon, and than you and your friends can just checkout and decide what fits for you.

It’s better to familiarize yourself with this software locally, especially the permissions system. I remember that in older versions of phpBB you had to modify the registration form by adding some custom field to prevent mass bot registrations, although I imagine that nowadays this must be solved with some plugin.