tobyzerner

It's buggy, prone to spam, probably not secure, missing features, etc. Probably should've named it an alpha, almost. But if you're game you could give it a spin - we're running our support forum on it currently. Will fill out that roadmap tomorrow :)

This is something we haven't tackled yet, but we definitely want to make this kind of thing easy at some point in the future.

Fair points. I guess I consider esoTalk to be somewhat of a lost cause in terms of the way it's built. It's a pain to implement fixes and features, maintain, and is pretty limited in what it can do (and how it can be extended). Simply put, I didn't enjoy working on it.

When I said "I have produced some low-quality code and APIs that will surely need revision", I'm mostly talking about more semantic things like class naming and organization. The majority of Flarum's architecture is very solid, testable, and will be easy to maintain. Doesn't compare to esoTalk.

Admittedly, if I just wanted to start a business and make some cash, you're right: I probably could've just persisted with esoTalk. But it's not all about money – it's also about doing the best work that I can, enjoying it, and making damn good forum software with great potential.

There will eventually be a migration path from esoTalk to Flarum, and I still merge PRs from time to time... so I like to think I'm not completely abandoning the esoTalk folk!

Flarum automatically redirects to the non-JS version if there's an error booting up the JS app. What browser are you using?

Can I ask specifically what you don't like about the direction Discourse/Flarum are taking?

I can't hope to compete with Discourse on features (yet!), but I think Flarum's elegance sets it apart. Out of the box, it's pretty, fast, easy to use, and works beautifully on mobile. And it's written in PHP, so is super easy to install – any low-end shared host will do.