Show HN: We built a platform for forums and called it Microcosm

Font-sizing in our defaults prefers relaxed readability over information density.

It sounds like (from your comment and the grandparent) we should create a second theme specifically focused on information density.

The compare + pricing is comparing our offering "Microcosm" to our competitor offerings. It isn't comparing various packages we offer.

We only have one plan, it includes everything.

Though other founders suggest we invent another couple of plans to hit the Goldilocks "too hot, too cold, just about right" method of selling.

And yes, Vanilla is strangely priced considering the market, but they do have some compelling features too... everyone draws up their comparison tables to favour themselves. I actually wanted to promote the fact that we don't support signature at all as a positive.

Damn that phrase, now changed.

This is actually one of the more subtle and interesting things. Our business model is based on two things we know:

1) Communities already create transactions and revenue as a by-product of conversations and engagement

2) The majority of forums never break even and are a cost-centre

When looking at which problems forum owners want solving, aside from the technical things (installing, updating, security, backup, configuration), and the social things (engagement, search, features, schisms, moderation and permissions), the recurring concern is that forums seldom to never pay for themselves.

The thing we're fixing with our business model is just that... how to make a forum financially viable to the site admin and the users.

We do this predominantly by pushing down the costs by having a platform with efficient software and design.

But we also do it by recognising that solving some of the problems "Our community wants events but right now they're on Facebook, EventBrite, Meetup and Google Calendar" helps to return some of the externalised transactions back to where the community is.

We plan to charge service fees, as per eBay or Meetup, for things like selling tickets to events, or for helping to handle payments for classifieds.

No user of a forum that isn't selling something is going to be paying, and nor are you as the site admin (except the low flat-rate fee for owning the site).

But we will add features to help bring more transactions back into the community and where others (you or your users) make money from those we'll charge service fees for facilitating them.

It's the difference between pushing down the costs aggressively and helping forums make money through transactions, that is where we believe our actual revenue will be. We really think that by entangling our success with your success means that we have to make the right product for the forum users and forum admins. We can't just sell you hosting and walk away from you... we have to make sure every user is happy and your engagement stays high... we need to make sure the UX is awesome.

On the legal docs, we asked our lawyers to draft three documents that help protect site admins from various things: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal

Namely, we've designed the documents to work with sites that have reactive moderation to ensure that the site admin isn't liable for defamation, slander, fraud by users, bullying, etc.

This is going way further than other forums with just a COPPA doc and a template privacy policy, we've looked at the risks a forum admin is exposed to and specifically are addressing those. We are protecting our customers, not just us. Though our ability to do this is limited, you can choose to apply your own legal terms and remove any protection our documents offer you.

On pagination, we've design it with infinite scroll in mind. All UX feedback to date has preferred pages so that is what we've gone with. We suspect that when we get to a native mobile app infinite scroll will be back.

I'm a vB user too, I run http://www.lfgss.com amongst others. The minimalism is by-design on Microcosm, users like their own expression but not necessarily that of others. Humans are great like that. We've chosen to keep the content clean, the conversations and events, but to allow a comment area on the profile page where literally anything can be inserted. So far, it's the best balance we've found for this, but it will be revisited when we have a wider diversity of interests covered by the forums we host... it will give us a better understanding of how people in different interest verticals want to express and distinguish themselves.

Events is just the first of the structured types of content that will be in a forum. We hope to make the other types as good as we've made our first-bash of the event type. Though we have to solve recurring events first.

Thanks for all the feedback, and let me know what you think about that first set of things re: service fees and our business model. It's definitely something that has raised questions, we know we are not the right product for the top few % of forums in the world, but we've received a lot of very enthusiastic feedback from mid-sized forums that have between 50 and 500 peak concurrent users that this is something they love about us.

I should be able to click on "Designed for All Devices" and see examples of the forums on mockups of all kinds of devices.

You are missing a huge opportunity here. Only people that have a huge need AND have decided that phpBB isn't for them will take the work to see what you have to offer. That is already a small percentage of the market right there.

And just because you have mobile traffic doesn't mean that your site is good on mobile. They use it because they have to not because it is good. I worked at a site that was openly antagonistic to mobile traffic and it still account for 10% of our paid signups.