Still Unbuilt

All 100 ideasCommunities

#33 of 100 · Communities

Forums worth hosting again

Simple, modern forum software a small group can host themselves, with persistent searchable threads instead of Discord, light install and email posting.

12asks, each re-read
12separate threads
9of 19 years
4since 2024
2008first asked

Asks per year

1’08’101’12’14’1611’182’202’221’2412’26

What the askers want

  • Would pay0%
  • Want it local or private25%
  • Object to subscriptions0%
  • Want it open source or self-hosted50%
  • Want AI to do it0%

Share of the 12 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.

What exists on Show HN

Built, still asked for18 Show HN launches do this job, and 2 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.

Instead of: Discord, Discourse, Google Groups, phpBB

The idea, as matched

Modern, easy-to-run forum software (a successor to phpBB or an HN clone) that a group can host on its own domain, with persistent searchable threads instead of Discord and optional email participation.

Jev first matched 27 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 12 of 27.

Every ask, newest first

Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.

Reader’s note. Many asks are for communities to join, not software; excluded.

  1. May 2026Wants a better alternative to PHP forums, having found Discourse unsatisfactory. Read it: a comment in “CPanel's Black Week: 3 New Vulnerabilities Patched After Attack on 44k Servers”
  2. Feb 2026Wants forum plus chat tooling embeddable as a website page, cheaper and more mobile-friendly than phpBB. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: What do you want people to build?”
  3. Oct 2025Wants an open-source, threaded social site like Hacker News or Twitter to self-host. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there an open source HN?”
  4. May 2024Asks for a free forum for an engineering community, as an alternative to Discord. Read it: a comment in “Stop Using Discord”
  5. Sep 2021Wants a Discord-like app with persistent, searchable forum topics, since old Discord chat is effectively lost. Read it: a comment in “Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord”
  6. Mar 2021Wants a free Discourse or Flarum-style forum without MySQL or Postgres, ideally on SQLite, for shared hosting. Read it: a comment in “Flatboard: Simple, Lightweight, Modern, Flat-File Forum, Using JSON and Markdown”
  7. Dec 2019Asks which site could replace Yahoo Groups. Read it: a comment in “Verizon/Yahoo Blocking Attempts to Archive Yahoo Groups – Deletion: Dec. 14”
  8. Sep 2019Seeks open-source forum software as a vBulletin alternative, comparing modern and classic designs. Read it: a comment in “High-severity vulnerability in vBulletin is being actively exploited”
  9. Oct 2018Asks for sensible, ideally self-hosted, forum software. Read it: a comment in “Unslacking Tideways Company”
  10. Apr 2017Wants a self-hostable, imgur-like forum CMS that a non-technical friend can run for a welding group. Read it: a comment in “Why There Are No New Social Networks”
  11. Sep 2012Wants forum software with an email interface so members can post and reply by mail or the website. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Can web forums and email live together in harmony?”
  12. May 2008Wants an open-source forum script in Python that integrates with their existing login system. Read it: a post: “Anyone know of a good open-source forum script in Python?”

Building this?

Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.

See all 100How the counts work

Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own

This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.

Get your own box

$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.