Forums Refresh

Over the past year we have been hard at work on refreshing the . Before you go check it out, lets first take a look at why we are doing this.

What a forum means to us

Our forums have been a staple in originated from a forum posting?
Nowadays a large majority of people communicate through real-time chat services, like

vBulletin had been powering the forums since 2006 (from the days of Remote-Exploit) . For a long time this has worked great and provided our users a good platform to ask questions and give answers. However, we took a step back and saw that our setup was:

• Lacking quite a bit of modern functionality that other forums were offering.


• Not giving the same user experience and interface as our other end-user sites.


• Behind the scenes, we were spending more time doing certain tasks, as it was missing moderation tools that were needed.

With a recent wave of spam bots flooding the site, it was the kick we needed to finally find the time to look for solutions.

The search

We knew from the start that there were a lot of options we could go with. We took the time to figure out what we need out of a forum and how we wanted our user experience to look. This helped us to narrow our options down to a few quality choices.

We were looking for something that has frequent updates, is secure, can integrate into our other sites, and can be customized to our liking. We spent a while weighing up the pros and cons of each, looking at examples of live environments and seeing what their communities look like. After examining our options, it became clear we needed to add another factor, self-hosting.

A question someone may be asking is why do we need to bother with all of this? Why not use something like Reddit , or some other similar service ? The issue with these options is that we do not control the site, and various rules can prevent us from using them how we would prefer to. So, we are back to looking for solutions that meet all our criteria.

XenForo and Discourse were in the lead. When left with XenForo versus Discourse, we felt like we could do well with either one. Unfortunately, XenForo does have a higher cost of entry for self-hosting. Had it not been for this, the competition would be much closer.

Hello, Discourse

After taking a look at multiple possible forum solutions and what they bring to the table, we settled on , and added features and applied various tweaks/modification to improve the user navigation and viewing experience.

Along with this, we also have a whole new team of moderators thanks to our lovely moderators on Discord.