What's the to-go platform to host a forum?
I have been a long-time user of a comic books forum that unfortunately decided some time ago to migrate to Tapatalk. I now hate even clicking on the forum's link because of the ads, pop-ups, etc. of the Tapatalk format.
I am trying to convince the other users of the forum to migrate to another platform and I was wondering if there is a clear winner between all the open source platforms out there, such as phpbb, discourse, etc. I'd second this. If you don't want to manage it all yourself, you can farm that part out to DiscourseHosting: https://www.communiteq.com/. I use them for one of my forums and find them very responsive when it comes to settings things up. You'll probably need that if you're migrating from PHPBB. For new forums, discourse is great as it's far easier to get started populating a new forum. It's less obvious that it's a sparsely populated forum as the main page isn't broken down by categories with low numbers of posts. IMHO Discourse is pretty nice. Some other alternatives: reddit, it seems. Can be made private as well. I know that's not exactly what you were looking for, but it's true that the discussion that used to be on private, unconnected forums is now on reddit. I would think that NNTP is good. (It would also be possible to provide a web interface in addition to the NNTP; there are a few such programs.) PHPBB is sadly still the best (sadly because PHP is the perhaps-undeserved joke of the programming language kingdom).