Orange Forum is an easy to deploy forum that has minimal dependencies (only Postgres) and uses almost no javascript. It is written in golang and a compiled binary is available for linux. Try the latest version hosted at https://community.goodoldweb.com/. Please contact [email protected] if you have any questions or want support.

Install PostgreSQL and create a database and user using the psql command:

CREATE DATABASE testdb;
CREATE USER dbuser WITH PASSWORD 'dbpass';
ALTER ROLE dbuser SET client_encoding TO 'utf8';
ALTER ROLE dbuser SET default_transaction_isolation TO 'read committed';
ALTER ROLE dbuser SET timezone TO 'UTC';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE testdb TO dbuser;

Download the Orange Forum binary and migrate the database with:

./orangeforum -migrate

Create a domain (example: community.goodoldweb.com):

./orangeforum -createdomain

Create an admin:

./orangeforum -createsuperuser

Enter the SMTP server details (optional):

./orangeforum -setsmtp

Finally, start the server (don't forget to change the secret key!):

SECRET_KEY=s6JM1e8JTAphtKNR2y27XA8kkAaXOSYB ORANGEFORUM_DSN="postgres:https://dbuser:dbpass@localhost:5432/testdb" ./orangeforum -alsologtostderr

Goto https://localhost:9123/forums/community.goodoldweb.com in your browser. If you have setup DNS, you can directly go to https://community.goodoldweb.com and skip the /forums/community.goodoldweb.com part of the path. A single instance of Orange Forum can support multiple domains.

There are two types of privileged users in orangeforum: admin, and mod. Both can edit/delete/close posts and ban users. In addition to these privileges, admins control which users are designated as mods.

• Go 1.16 (only for compiling)
• Postgres 9.5 or newer