Comment by ErroneousBosh

I actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise.

It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)

The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.

It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.

Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.

The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.

Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).

I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)

[1] https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb