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.

Every single forum I see now is using this:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.

I work at Discourse. As a regular user, if you want to prevent these new user badges (and notifications), head to /u/yourusername/preferences/interface and check "Skip new user onboarding tips and badges".

It is in our plans to eventually rework how this new user education and notification system works, and I suppose eventually with https://id.discourse.com/ the intent would be that your preferences follow you to every Discourse site you sign up for, so you could just set it once.

As an admin, badges can be disabled entirely, or individually.

I just wish that the whole badges thing was off by default. It's a forced gamification that's just annoying and doesn't really teach anything.

Except for that, I love Discourse.

It's their way of attempting to fight user churn. Forums need all the help they can get in that regard given the attention economy of today and the giants they're attempting to fight against. Anything novel is a win.

You are just being extremely nitpicky.

Discourse is awful software, from a user standpoint.

But its better than all the other forum software I've seen...

I hate the scrollbar hijacking and lazy loading on larger threads.

I just want pagination and to use my stock browser features...

Thanks, I'll have to look into it too, though the gamification sounds annoying AF.

I responded to the other comment, but I work at Discourse. As a site admin you can disable badges (which is our gamification system) entirely, or you can get rid of individual badges.

If you're interested in trying Discourse, our lowest hosting plan is $20/month, or if you want to self-host there have been a bunch of improvements in the setup process recently, see https://meta.discourse.org/t/self-hosting-discourse-just-got...

You could take a look at https://nodebb.org/

Thanks, I'll check it out :)

I wonder if it was a bit of a power display. Showing they are untouchable.

Canadian here, could you share the name of the provider? I'd love to move to something more local and just need a basic small vps for a simple apache host. I know of a couple providers but never talked to anyone actually using one.

I did a detailed review of a few Canadian VPS providers last year.

https://lukecyca.com/2025/canadian-vps-review.html

Last year, I moved from DigitalOcean to FullHost (their Vancouver datacentre) for hosting a small SaaS and a bunch of personal projects. It's cheaper and FAR better performance.

Thanks! I'll check it out!

It was ServaRICA as someone else suggested. It was a Black Friday hybrid VPS deal from a few years ago, looks like they still have comparable stuff on their site. For the cost I would generally assume anything important needs to be duplicated in case the company folds or a fire unless you pay them for such a service. (I don't have any vested interest in suggesting them.)

Thanks! Nothing important, personal site with the source stored in a git repo replicated to a few places, so them folding would just be a minor inconvenience.

They're probably talking about ServaRICA. They post deals on LowEndTalk.

Thank you!

So autotools but for execution instead of compilation?

As a child I loved watching construction sites! I'd literally plop myself on the group and couldn't be moved until I was done. This would be ideal retirement for me. Though as I am a house spouse, I won't really get a retirement, gotta keep cooking meals, doing laundry, dishes and cleaning. At least I'll have no deathbed regrets about not spending enough time with my daughter though!

I do this but for music with Home Assistant. I haven't dug around much to see if it's possible to cast video from Jellyfin the same way. From what I read (and it's been a while) the Jellyfin API was more limited, but maybe that's changed by now.

ChromeOS is based in Gentoo.

Yes, Gentoo is like NixOS, sort of a meta-distribution.

Being the base of ChromeOS makes it highly influential.

ChromeOS market share is >5% in many countries, sometimes around double digits.

This reminds me of the Kids in the Hall Skit, "Direction's (I Speak no English)". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgoEhsJORU

That attitude is sadly probably a small factor in you not having a billion dollars.

Right, you don't just "good person" yourself into billions of dollars. There will always be a trail of people screwed over, or taken advantage of along the way. Or you can go the more modern way and externalize all the negative impacts of your business (e.g. scooter rental companies).

Sad isn't it. There don't be many honest ways to make real money

I'm curious did you have an OEM license or a retail license? OEM licenses die with the mobo.

OEM licenses are for the computer, not the motherboard. The online activation historically hasn't worked if you change motherboard, but the phone line folks would always activate it for you if you explained that it was the same computer with a different motherboard.

TIL. I always heard that their licensing people tended to uphold the motherboard line.

i bought a builder license from newegg in 2017. unfortunately i was not diligent about saving the product key. this was actually the third time i had been in this scenario after changing hardware. no idea why it wouldn’t work this time around.