Comment by ahhhhnoooo

I'm being completely serious, but what is the current fav open source forum software these days? I'd love to host a forum for a small community I'm involved in. Not a stranger to hosting other things across a variety of stacks, so I'm not particular about technology used.

At least this would make FAQs and other important bits of information available to non-users and search engines.

That would be great if your community only exists in a voip channel

I gave up running my TS3 servers (after nearly a decade) because they added a trialware system that required getting approval/serial code from the company every month to continue operating. They were squeezing everyone on TS3 trying to force them to TS4/5/etc. Have they stopped this or walked it back?

And to be clear, Teamspeak from version 5 on is not teamspeak. It's matrix with a skin. Not that that's terrible, but it's not great for running it on low power/cost VPS like actual teamspeak was.

I had a look at Teamspeak but you need to email somebody for permission to have more than 32 users on your server.

Those are voice chat, yeah? Discord has chat too, which is used more than voice in many of my communities.

> Someone bring back AOL instant messenger! >:(

There's an actively developed open source server that allows the clients to connect!

https://github.com/mk6i/open-oscar-server

I wish Smarter Child was still around so we could see how LLMs interact with it.

Seconding campfire. Straightforward, easy to host, easy to backup, no monetization strategy. Most self-hosted alternatives have complicated deployments to enable scaling to >1,000s of users which I will never, ever need.

Is this open source? Would be cool to self host this..

Yeah Stoat is the closest, but no video calling still. But that's in the pipeline at least