Please consider upgrading to a more modern forum

[sp3ctre]

[ref=#105289]sp3ctre[/ref], given that you have plenty on your plate in your own life, I would suggest we happily stay as we are for now until such time as you can devote more attention to it. There are bound to be teething troubles and you really don't need to be pestered about them all.
I know i'm a stick in the mud, but I'm sure, given this scenario, no-one would expect you to be faffing about with the forum too.

Cheers mate... I do love this stuff, so although I don't want to commit to anything I would likely setup a test site for a while and see how it goes before migrating anyway. That way I could get a feel for things and also take the pressure off.

I second what Martin has posted. You do a brilliant job. The Forum works really well and has done for such a long time. It is right that there is debate but I reckon if there was a survey the majority of members would express their satisfaction with the Forum in its current form.
Thank you for for providing a platform which offers help and entertainment for so many.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. If we do change what I ideally want to do is retain as much of the user experience that we have at the moment, with the same features etc.... replicate the good bits as much as possible.

As I said, PHPBB has served me well since 2007, but the bigger we get the more things concern me, such as:

Upgrades - the upgrade process for PHPBB is awful!
Plugins - I have added a ton of plugins to get functionality such as polls, categories for for-sale etc. All of these are at risk of breaking on every upgrade, especially when v4 comes around
WYSIWYG editor - I have heard the complaints that the current editor is old fashioned, but in PHPBB there are no good plugins to do that

So what I would look to do is try as much as possible to keep the core functionality the same while allowing extra features to be added (login via social etc).

 

[jonzo]

One thing that does seem interesting is the Xenforo gallery plugin they have (the official one). It's always concerned me in terms of potential hosting costs if everyone uploads a thousand photos of their car, but it'd certainly be a cool feature to have.

I don't know enough about Xenforo and what the config options are, but we have a lot of photos on our forum as well (it's about leisure boating in a specific region). Invision offer teirs within their SaaS offering and you get a certain number of GB depending on your plan.

However - You can also just specify your own S3 buckets and use those so you have complete control over the spend. In addition, with the bucket being in our own control we have the option of checking it all out somewhere and running an image optimiser over it to reduce the footprint of any files which the forum software hasn't done a good job of compressing. You could also periodically reduce the size of any photos over x years old, for instance.

Invision queried why we didn't just use their buckets as it was "simpler" and we said "cost, mate!". Another reason is that their infrastructure is primarily in US AWS zones and we're in the UK so wanted to choose something closer for lower latency.

We moved images to S3 some time before we moved to the SaaS and obviously there was a noticeable change in disk utilisation, but also in RAM, CPU and bandwidth as our server was only doing the compression part rather than outbound traffic. The other benefit was that when we needed to move to a different server, it was pretty quick and easy as there was FAR less to copy since the majority of content was in the CDN (ie S3). The actual application and database are pretty small and can be moved in minutes.

With my work hat on now, we basically never store/serve anything like images on web servers any more. It's all in AWS / Azure / GCP (depending on system / client) and actually even static pages can go in there sometimes.

You've mentioned upgrades, and that's an area where we have seen a big difference. It's so easy with Invision, whereas phpBB was basically just using a diffing tool and expecting us to know the impact to merging a code change. And I say that as a senior dev / platform lead with knowledge of just how irresponsible phpBB's upgrade process is.

Please don't take any of what I'm saying as criticism - It's more me sharing thoughts / observations from my 16ish years of running our forum, and my experiences of pulling my hair out with phpBB versus how much easier things are now.

 

[jonzo]

Cheers mate... I do love this stuff, so although I don't want to commit to anything I would likely setup a test site for a while and see how it goes before migrating anyway. That way I could get a feel for things and also take the pressure off.

That's what we did.

 

[sp3ctre]

We moved images to S3 some time before we moved to the SaaS and obviously there was a noticeable change in disk utilisation, but also in RAM, CPU and bandwidth as our server was only doing the compression part rather than outbound traffic. The other benefit was that when we needed to move to a different server, it was pretty quick and easy as there was FAR less to copy since the majority of content was in the CDN (ie S3). The actual application and database are pretty small and can be moved in minutes.

With my work hat on now, we basically never store/serve anything like images on web servers any more. It's all in AWS / Azure / GCP (depending on system / client) and actually even static pages can go in there sometimes.

Interesting regarding S3. From what I see on my server there is limited benefit to doing that as I am using Cloudflare, so once an image is served once it gets served crom the CDN next time. Seems to be working well and the server load is pretty ok. So unless disk space becomes an issue I think I'll probably keep operating this way as cost-wise it's definitely the best.

I am loathed to do anything that increased cost, as with search traffic decreasing, add revenue tanking etc, I don't want to end up in a situation where it's no longer viable. That said, I do have a value on my time, so whichever way I go the quicker and easier upgrades become the happier I will be

 

[jonzo]

Yeah, keeping forums going is hard. Much harder than it was 10 years ago, and even 5 perhaps.

Facebook groups wiped out a good percentage of our traffic. In our case, there are probably 20+ different groups covering our subject matter. We used to be the second-biggest of about 5 forums and we're basically the only one left. We do have the pick of sponsors now though...

I'm a big fan of forums and much prefer them. There's generally a real sense of community with forums and you tend to find that the people with really useful knowledge hang out on them.

Another massive benefit is of course that they exist to be a community, not as a way of keeping people on Facebook so that Meta can sling ads at them and harvest data about them and their interests.

It's a shame that a lot of the car forums have sold out to Verticalscope, but given the complexities of keeping them running I guess it's not that surprising. My daily is a Kia and I really hate using the UK owners' forum, similarly the Honda forums were nicer before they were sold.

 

[ryushe]

Even simple things like the ability to like a post as a quick acknowledgment or thank you for someone replying to your thread would make a big difference,

No, just take the damned time to actually thank people in words instead of a stupid icon.

 

[Drefoldn]

You'll definitely notice a drop off to begin with but Google is pretty smart and you'll get re-indexed soon enough. Google (and other SEs) actually love Discourse because Discourse shows a very basic SE friendly site to bots (you can see this yourself by turning off JS on a Discourse forum). Out of all the forum platforms I have worked with, Discourse has been the best for SEO.



I'm not sure which Discourse forums you have seen but Discourse was created by the same people who made Stack Overflow, and they have over 100 (paid) staff/developers and have received millions in funding... as a developer who has worked with all the major forum platforms I can confidently say that they really are currently the best forum platform around in terms of features, user-approval(once-they-get-used-to-it), etc.

There’s also a broader angle here that often gets overlooked: SEO isn’t just about crawling and indexing, but also about how content is surfaced and monetized around user intent. For example, the way modern platforms structure checkout flows and user journeys is closely tied to visibility and conversion patterns, which is discussed in more detail in this payment acceptance article.

If these are a consideration for you then you may want to look at Xenforo instead (currently the 'best' of the forums that is closest to this one, and easy enough for non-developers to customise).

Whatever you decide, good luck - I much prefer supporting independent platforms like this than big US-tech companies like facebook, twitter, instagram, reddit etc, hence thought it was worth making this suggestion.

You’re mostly on point about how Discourse behaves from an SEO perspective. It’s true that out of the box it renders a fairly clean HTML version for crawlers, and if JS is disabled you still get a readable structure, which helps indexing compared to a lot of heavier SPA-style forums.

The “drop off then recovery” pattern is also something you commonly see after migrations or major platform switches — Google essentially needs to re-evaluate internal linking structure, canonical URLs, and engagement signals before rankings stabilize again. That part is pretty normal and not specific to Discourse.

On the platform side, the comparison is fair but a bit nuanced. Discourse does have strong modern UX and built-in SEO friendliness, and the team behind it has a solid engineering pedigree (including ties to Stack Overflow’s early ecosystem). But it’s also true that its flexibility leans toward “structured opinionated system” rather than deep arbitrary customization.

Where I’d slightly disagree is the idea that it’s mainly for large organizations. It is widely used by larger communities, but smaller communities can run it fine too — the real constraint is usually operational overhead (hosting, upgrades, plugins), not size.

 

[smorris_12]

To quote Rolf the Dog: that boat has sailed, my friend.

I've read your post twice and I know you're not one of the recent influx of AI bots, but bloody hell that reads like a dictionary attack fed into a drunk LLM. But you can have one point for not using the word "synergy."

The site moved a while ago. The type of site we have is mostly irrelevant, it only really affects the "user experience" (I feel dirty now) and the biggest takeaway we've had is having a Like button (which we, err, like.) I can't imagine we need optimising vertically upwards in the SEO ranking playoffs as there isn't vast competition from other sites or even pages on the godawful Facebook so we always come up if someone has got a Z4 they want to talk about.