After years of UG suggestions that we migrate the forum to a pre-built solution, Kirik and I are seriously evaluating the idea. Our existing custom forum is expensive to maintain, feature-poor, and not easy to moderate and grow. Further, the framed version is built with 20 years old, dead-language code. It has to be supported by a virtual machine that can no longer run security updates without breaking the site.
We have used many forums through the years and like a lot of you, we still use frames every day. Migrating away from something that some of our community has used for over twenty years is not a decision we would take lightly.
After a deep dive into a large number of forum solutions, our frontrunner is Discourse. It is super feature-rich forum and runs on a hosted platform. It has an enormous community of developers.
When you look at the features, it has everything anyone has ever asked we add to this forum:
It also is built on a trust system whereby new members have to earn features by being a positive, contributing member: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
We are by no means wedded to this solution. We hope to get feedback from you, our members. Towards that end, we invite everyone to sign up and give this candidate a test drive.
If we can come to a consensus that this is the best thing moving forward, we would work to migrate this forum, all our users, all your threads, and all your replies going back to since ever to this new solution.
We have setup a sandbox at https://discuss.mixedmartialarts.com, you can sign up right now and your account will be approved quickly. You can try to create a post, reply to post, view the forums by latest or top, look at profile pages, create polls, add rich media content, get notifications through your browser and/or email, and a very great deal more.
Please leave any feedback, bad or good, here and let’s see what happens.