Open Source Forums?

[Heroine Hunter X]

I've been wanting to start a forum for writing stories for some time now. This week I have been looking at various forum softwares deciding which will ultimately provide the features I'm looking for. No single piece of software will meet all my needs, so I'll have to develop (or contract out) plugins. That being said I have some questions for anyone that might know:

1. I love the look, style, and organization of F95Zone. When I think of what I would like, many of the feature ideas come from elements I've seen here. I can't seem to figure out what forum software it's using, however. If I were to guess, it's PHPBB, but honestly I would not know how to confirm this. It would be valuable because it gives me an idea of what's possible with the software.
2. Key features I need are these:
   1. Rating of posts in certain forums (i.e. only able to rate stories)
      1. I really like the review tab F95Zone has for it's games. That would be incredible on a story forum
   2. Tagging system with search (stories only)
      1. ideally only admins could make tags, but users could apply from the predefined list
   3. Only Authors can post in the stories forums
   4. Disable quoting initial post
      1. I would like to make it so users can't quote a story, because lets face it, some yahoos will and that makes the comment section crazy bloated
   5. Post templates for specific forums to simplify making news posts making clear what's required
   6. Advanced formatting of posts for stories
   7. I want the stories to be novel formatted only on story forums:
      1. All text Justified like novels
      2. First line of every paragraph indented
   8. Patreon links on Author profiles so they can gain support for their writing

This is what I have mapped out so far. Please, if you have any insight, I'd love to hear it.

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

F95Zone is based on Xenforo, it isn't free to use.

If you want a forum based on free software that you can customise infinitely, have you looked at WordPress?

 

[Heroine Hunter X]

F95Zone is based on Xenforo, it isn't free to use.

If you want a forum based on free software that you can customize infinitely, have you looked at WordPress?

Ah, ha! I did come across Xenoforo, interesting. Thanks for that info. I have tried WordPress, but got frustrated with trying to make it what I wanted. There seem to be endless plugins for it, even forum plugins, but I just felt a bit overwhelmed by the vast amount of use cases. That, and I didn't want users to have to use the WordPress backend to do their posting. It just didn't feel simple enough the way forums do. Of course, I'm open to suggestions on what plugin features I could use with WordPress.

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

Ah, ha! I did come across Xenoforo, interesting. Thanks for that info. I have tried WordPress, but got frustrated with trying to make it what I wanted. There seem to be endless plugins for it, even forum plugins, but I just felt a bit overwhelmed by the vast amount of use cases. That, and I didn't want users to have to use the WordPress backend to do their posting. It just didn't feel simple enough the way forums do. Of course, I'm open to suggestions on what plugin features I could use with WordPress.

Almost anything is possible with WordPress, but it will take a lot of work.
Having said that, anything will take a lot of work to get it just how you want it.

 

[wtp-support]

• phpBB. ...
• MyBB Forum Platform. ...
• Vanilla-Free Forum Software. ...
• Simple Machines Forum. ...
• Discourse Forum Platform. ...
• Nodebb Community. ...
• Flarum Opensource Forum Software. ...
• bbPress- A WordPress Forum platform.