Would be awesome if they open sourced the forum they built - we need alternatives to vBulletin and phpBB!

There's dozens of forum apps available, both classical and endlessly scrolling. Discourse is well-known but suffers from extreme feature creep. Flarum, myBB, NodeBB, Vanilla, …

And then there's also closed-source apps.

How is Discourse's customization tooling? phpBB's ability to let ~anyone go in and add random stuff as plugins was really powerful back in the day IMO

There are many plugins, check https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin/22

The flexibility of Ruby makes it kinda easy to change behavior.

Full Disclosure, I work there.

There's thousands of alternatives though, it's assessing them that's difficult.

Anecdotal, we moved to Xenforo some years ago, it was built by the people that built vB before version 3 / before it was bought up and made shit. It's nothing fancy but it has everything you need. It doesn't get updated very often either, but then, it's feature-complete; vB suffered from feature bloat, including stuff like adding a CMS to it.

What's wrong with vBulletin and phpBB? It's a genuine question, mostly naive - I've used but never admin'd them.

I'd imagine that the complaint is that they're old and don't particularly meet UX expectations in the 20s.

I do like them, and have great memories of them, they were my childhood. But I do think we're overdue for a modern forum stack. Discourse was a step in that direction, but a lot of people strongly dislike it, and it doesn't seem to have gotten the reach of others before it.

A real contender for "new forum software" would have to address the fact that Discord is its competitor, not other forum software, and it would have to have a very compelling answer for "why this instead of Discord".

> modern forum stack

Genuinely curious, what would that be?

From user perspective is there anything else to the forum than Read/Post/Search?

Or are you referring to administration and moderation tasks?

I'm referring to the whole UX of it, really. The experience for mobile users, the "join community" process for new users, the experience for the community owner, not just moderation but how easy it is to start a new community. You can go and start a new Discord community in a minute. It's free and with no restrictions on the number of members.

Anyone wanting to launch new forum software needs to compete with that.

And on top of that, "just self-host" isn't enough in an era where developers don't even want to self-host their own projects anymore, let alone some third-party forum. That's another thing that has -deeply- changed in the last 20 years.

This really describes the value prop of reddit, or something like it.

vBulletin is commercial, as is Invision Community, its primary competitor.

phpBB is pretty badly dated. It still works but it's clunky and development has been very slow. (The last major release was four years ago; everything since then has been minor maintenance.)

Well for vBulletin specifically it's that the software was bought out by a company called Internet Brands, who got rid of the original team and screwed up the last three versions of it.

vBulletin 4 is okay, but 5 and 6 are poorly coded, extremely inefficient and full of bugs even today.

Some of the original team went off to create XenForo, which has basically replaced vBulletin for most large forums now, though that itself has its own issues.

Afaik Flarum is open source. Also there is still xenforo as a paid alternative with available source for self hosted licenses

Agreed, have they not open sourced it? It seems like an org that would.

HA is so great. It can be used for much more than "home automation/IoT", and I find myself using it as a piece of infrastructure for other self hosted stuff.

For example, rather than sending SMTP email logs for backup jobs, I just push that data to a HA webhook.

I also use it for scraping alerts: once the scraper fires a trigger, it pushes a webhook to Home Assistant, which sends me a push notification on my iPhone.

Great all around tool -- for the house, but for a bunch of other random stuff too!

> Camping the stupid giant in the ocean island for my epic weapon.

Ah, the Ancient Cyclops camp to get the jboots.

I remember spending an entire weekend, from Friday after school to Sunday night, camping AC and never getting him to spawn.

Good times.

Yup. Subaru offers remote start via an app at $75 for the first 3 years when you buy a new car, but it renews at $300 (prepaid for 3 years) after that.

Ridiculous

OPs method would allow for remoting into your home network without port forwarding, since home network would establish a connection to the 'bounce' node, which would facilitate communication between the 3rd WG client

True, but on the bounce server it looks like the ports are just being managed via nftables. Isn't that just a wash?

Don't see how... Nftables is set up once and then left alone. Or could as well just be left alone entirely.

For minimal setup, zerotier looks like the winner.

> Don't see how... Nftables is set up once and then left alone.

Same thing for a router configuration to accept inbound wireguard requests on a home network with dyndns. You set it up once and are done.

I see the benefit of the bounce server if you operate a network in an environment where you don't have the ability to control the router config; however, when you do have the ability to update firewall/router config, then I'd prefer just setting up a domain name and avoid the dependency on a third party server.

Dyndns does work when you have a say in at least one side of each potential connection, unless you want one of your NATted hosts to also act as a bounce server in a pinch.

But you do not seem to be getting that the use of nftables, for the open-network bounce server, is wholly optional.

ah, okay. Yes, I missed that. So the point of nftables then is just to avoid sending REJECT messages, so it makes it harder to determine what port wireguard is operating on?

Yes, it is my preference: When you drop packets, they stop costing you anything further, where rejecting them generates more work for you. And, you are providing attackers free information that you don't need to.

I am not sure the nftables configuration I have is right... It might permit using my bounce server to forward packets that then appear to come from it, if they happen to mention the right port. I would welcome advice.

After further investigation, I have discovered that dyndns would not solve my problem, because the firewall at one end is especially picky; even zerotier and tailscale admit (grudgingly) that they use bounce servers for such clients.