Ask HN: Is there any simple, clean and well-designed forum solution out there?

Why nobody made a proper forum, with a good UX/UI? Discourse is the closest existing software but it's not well designed, user profiles are a pain in the a… Something as well-designed as branch.com but that you could use privately. Any ideas?

I have spent many hours looking, only to come up empty. Discourse looks great, but I do not like Ruby and it runs like a fat pig with a lame leg. In other words, it needs decent hardware and careful tuning to get it to run well. Their only supported platform is Docker under Ubuntu, which is a bit restrictive. All the PHP forums look ancient and I hate PHP with a passion, too.

I would love to have something like the D language forums (http://forum.dlang.org/). Very snappy performance. But last time I checked there was no documentation whatsoever for the software.

Muut is an option, but I much prefer hosting it myself. Less expensive and more control.

I would love to see an open source forum coded in a high performance safe language like Haskell. In another year or two, Rust might be an option, too.

I get so frustrated about it, that sometimes I dream of launching a Kickstarter campaign. That is how the blogging platform Ghost got started, and it looks to have worked for them.

Jeff Atwood created Discus. The poster is explicitly looking for alternatives.

Have you looked at Xenforo? I find it fine.

I think it's just a problem people moved on from awhile ago. There were a few years when building a forum-solution (as a wordpress plugin or a standalone solution like VBulletin or PHPbb) was good business. But these days, who would you be building it for exactly? Many of the popular forums are either perfectly happy with their old solution, or are running on something completely custom.