Gleb Mazovetskiy

Thredded - Open source, self-hosted forums

Feature-rich and lightning fast forums. Works standalone or as a Rails engine. Markdown by default, with plugins for code highlighting, KaTeX math, and BBCode. No JavaScript required. Easy deployment on Heroku or Ansible.

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Gleb Mazovetskiy
We wrote the Thredded forums engine focusing on these things: 1. Client-side performance. Little JavaScript and lean CSS. Even the KaTeX math plugin renders math server-side. 2. Clean but discoverable UI. The focus is content. No dropdowns / hamburger menus. 3. Extensible but critical features are built-in to provide a foundation for plugins. Features such as notifications, moderation, permissions system, and full text search. 4. Pleasant on mobile for both browsing and content creation. This means a textarea instead of a rich text editor (by default). 5. Everything degrades gracefully when JavaScript is off. For example, preview-as-you-type becomes a "Preview" button if JavaScript is disabled. 6. The relational database for everything, including full text search. Data integrity is easy, no out-of-sync elasticsearch databases here. Runs on Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite. Boring technology => easy to deploy and run in production. The codebase is written in Ruby, has slowly developed over the years, and has extensive test coverage. I am very curious to hear what you think, and whether you've ever felt a need for a forum like that.
Roland Clifford
Good Job