Help Typedrawers find a new home

James Hultquist-Todd
James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 426
in TypeDrawers Announcements
Outages, increases in hosting fees, and random CSS changes abound. I think it's time to start looking at other options for forum hosting. If you are knowledgeable about such things I could use your help!

Comments

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,574
    I mentioned this to our web developer, and he recommends Discourse as a platform for this kind of forum. Neither he nor I have experience porting existing content to a new platform, though.
  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 284
    I’m not up to date on forum software, but if self hosting is an option (can a hosted vanilla instance be migrated to a self hosted one?), there’s a host in germany called hetzner which is subsidized by the government and has very good pricing on powerful dedicated servers as a result. because enterprise customers require brand new hard drives, when they leave hetzner, those servers get wiped and auctioned starting around €30 a month with terabytes of storage and effectively unlimited traffic (it’s not really an auction, I’m not sure why they call it that). throw it behind cloudflare and then you get a CDN with snappy speeds around the world for free (and SSL pass through - no certificate management - too)
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 386
    It seems the open source Vanilla version was discontinued, so moving to a new host would also mean migrating the forum to a new software platform. That sounds like some heavy lifting ;)

    Hetzner is great, I've been hosting my stuff with them for nearly 20 years. (I don't think they are subsidized by the government though)
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 74
    Maybe MyBB? Merge System includes Vanilla.
    MyBB offers a merge system for easy merging of multiple forums from various different popular forum software, allowing an easy conversion process to MyBB.

  • jeremy tribby
    jeremy tribby Posts: 284
    Jens Kutilek said:
    It seems the open source Vanilla version was discontinued, so moving to a new host would also mean migrating the forum to a new software platform. That sounds like some heavy lifting ;)

    Hetzner is great, I've been hosting my stuff with them for nearly 20 years. (I don't think they are subsidized by the government though)a
    oh you're right, I mixed that part up with OVH - similar providers in many ways. just a simple border I got wrong :wink:
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,515
    edited October 10
    I was about to post all what Georg just did, haha - the glyphsapp forum run on Discourse is great, and has a vanilla importer. James, keep us updated on what you need to make it happen :D
  • James Hultquist-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 426
    Looks like Discourse might be the answer. I'll look into it.
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,515
    Any updates a month on? :)
  • Georg Seifert
    Georg Seifert Posts: 683
    Contact me if you need a heads up.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,099
    I’m all for a hosting change. I can’t access the forum through my home internet any more, for several months now.
  • adamwhite
    adamwhite Posts: 53
    How about just using a custom Discord server? Forums are quite outdated.
  • adamwhite
    adamwhite Posts: 53
    mitradranirban said:
    adamwhite said:
    How about just using a custom Discord server? Forums are quite outdated. 
    https://blog.discourse.org/2025/11/the-death-of-community-memory/ may be the reason not to do so
    Discord is not Slack, and secondly, when you have each topic as a subchanell, then what's the difference than the forum?
  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 110
    "However, despite their popularity and interactive strengths, Discord communities face a significant challenge: discoverability.

    Unlike traditional forums or websites, Discord content isn't easily indexed by search engines. Valuable discussions, detailed threads, and insightful replies remain hidden behind server walls. This invisibility limits potential growth, restricts community reach, and hampers the opportunity for new users to find, join, and contribute to these vibrant communities."
    https://dev.to/tsabary/turning-discord-threads-into-seo-gold-making-your-discord-community-discoverable-48n2

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