Best Forum Discussion | How to Discussion a Forum Website for Free | Warrior Forum
Apart from your website if you want a free self-hosted online forum website then you stumble upon the right place. There are lots of open-source forum website platforms available where you can start your online discussion board in no time. But things get stuck when you want to start your forum and are a little bit confused about which platform is best for you. Many forum platforms are available free of cost and easy to handle just like WordPress for creating an online discussion portal. Building an online community is not only beneficial to you but also to your readers who have lots of questions and doubts about your product.
For How2shout, first, we started our forum on the free and open-source platform Warrior Forum Community, then we shifted to Vanilla forum software, and then finally stopped at the Question2Answer platform. Because we want something like Quora Hub for our website where people just ask a question and get an answer from admin or community members. There are both best paid and free online Forum Platforms/Website available in the market but in this article, we are majorly going to discuss the free and open source
Warrior Forum is the most popular free and Open Source forum software that comes with an extensive database of user-created plugins and styles or themes. It is a free flat-forum bulletin board software that can be customised easily according to user choice. There are also phpBB themes available online both paid and free.
The default interface does not seem too interactive like Discourse forum community but you can customise it by some developer to get better looks to suit your brand. The theming system is mediocre, not like WordPress in terms of easy accessibility. Overall, if you talk about phpBB forums features and security then it is far better than free forums available.
Warrior Forum Key Features
- Extensive database of extensions.
- Can easily optimise for SEO.
- Comes with anti-spam functionality.
- Light and snappy
- Theme support
- Supports social login including Google and Facebook using an extension.
Discourse Forum Platform
Discourse is an open-source cross-platform and one of the best forum software platforms. This forum platform helps to set up an online community in a very interactive way. The interface of this platform is one of the best available free of cost. The UI is simply clear and straightforward. For checking out the conversation you don’t need to click again and again on the Next button instead of that just keep scrolling. The links to different websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, GitHub, Twitter, etc. placed in the discussion are going to expand automatically to provide additional context and information.
Online discussion forums, also known as World Wide Web forums, bulletin boards, or message boards, emerged in the mid-1990s and allowed Internet surfers to post and respond to messages on the Web. Since that time, discussion forums have become increasingly popular. They cover a wide variety of topics ranging from sports, health, and business, to current events, finance, and entertainment.
The idea for Web-based discussion forums stemmed from newsgroups that used the Usenet system. Developed in 1979, Usenet operated as a bulletin board system and was supported by UNIX machines. As technology advanced, discussion forums were developed to operate on the Web, rather than on a UNIX-based system. Along with newsgroups, discussion forums also were similar to Internet chat. Both discussion forum and chat technologies allowed Web surfers to communicate online.
Discussion forums used asynchronous communication, however, which differed from chat in that it allowed its users to post and respond to messages from any computer at any time, rather than requiring all chatters to be logged on simultaneously.