What is the MakerForum.Tech About?

HouseOfBugs

Why?

This forum is something I wanted to set up as a general place not tied to any company for Makers to hangout and get help. This is a personal project of mine and I love forums. Their ability to easily index and find information makes them functionally better than solutions like Facebook Groups and Discord.

Suggestions

If you have suggestions on making this a better place to get help and meet other makers post below!

Marketing? Privacy?

No emails used to sign up will be used for anything other than your MakerForum.Tech account. This is not a site for sales crap. This is a MakerForum. We'll never sell your data, period. I am tired of companies selling data, I do not do that with my own company nor will I with this forum.

All the data on here (database and files) are currently on a VPS that's backed up to my local server daily. If the forum needs more storage I may move it to a dedicated box or a larger VPS.

What does it run on?

This forum runs on open source software called Flarum.

Who pays for it?

I do. I am not taking donations or anything. Any Amazon links posted will be affiliate links to help support the server costs. Just people using the forum is all that I want from this. I really cannot overstate how much I hate that Facebook groups have killed forums even though you can't find anything in them…

Walkerwally

Thanks for setting this up Tim. I hope a lot of your followers join. I think this forum could be quite helpful.

3D-Viewer

I agree with Walkerwally. Thank you for giving us a place to hangout and questioning about our 3d printers.

ChrisAtPsiquid

I'm hip to this. I miss the forum days of the innawebs

GeoffHorton

ChrisAtPsiquid

Preach it, brother!

Squishworx

I just read a thread here where a poster mentioned he makes holsters, and I had to look over my shoulder.

God, do I hate facebook/twitter, like with a blinding, white hot passion.

I love forums, since the BBS days of PCBoard. (50 nodes, crippling telephone bills, great user base!)

HouseOfBugs

Squishworx

Yeah FB would not "allow" any talk of that. Discord seems to be OK right now but with how often the rules change on these huge platforms you can never be sure if you're going to be kicked off for some BS reason.

Squishworx

Out of curiosity Tim, why did you decide on Flarum as your forum software?

HouseOfBugs

Squishworx

Just something I have used in the past. Discourse is neat but it's pretty complicated to setup on a VPS. Idk what other platforms are modern and still being worked on.

GooberGuz

Tim - this is cool !! Thanks for doing something like this - I hope we can help it grow !!

zchrykng

HouseOfBugs Any thought of using something like IRC or Matrix as an alternative to Discord? I'd agree that Discord is generally easier to use and all that, but IRC or Matrix could be self hosted and remove that point of dependency.

Squishworx

HouseOfBugs

I am a fan of ip.board simply for it's threading and maintaining categories. I'll definitely go through the Flarum stuff though.

HouseOfBugs

Squishworx

The server we are using right now does look to work with the Invision software. Hmmm…
EDIT: looked at their pricing and it's pretty high even for self hosted.

Squishworx

HouseOfBugs

For the forums I have run, it is bulletproof and worth every penny. As a company they suck, but their product is fantastic.

(If you want to play in the backend, I can set you up on one of our installs).

Squishworx

I am surprised you do not have your own web server Tim. You have to control your data.

HouseOfBugs

Squishworx

I don't have high upload speeds here to host something that gets high traffic. I do the next best thing, which is take backups of the files and SQL databases to my local box here daily.

Will-in-MN

Thanks for this! Glad to be here.

staticlinerich

Nice. Thanks for doing this. Look forward to the interchange.

Steamcheng

Thanks for the forum, Tim! I've already learned a few things here.