Not to be confused with Discord...
Discourse forums are visually beautiful, thoughtfully designed, and just a pleasure to use. Here's what the Obsidian forum, running on Discord, looks like:
Obsidian forum - https://forum.obsidian.md/
Discourse is free, open source software (GPL v2 license). The setup process is extremely fast and easy. I've done it and I'm hardly even tech savvy.
I was very happy with my tiny Discourse forum during the time I had it. I've also enjoyed using Discourse forums that I didn't run.
The cost is very reasonable too. The Digital Ocean droplet that Discourse recommends for smaller communities costs $6/month and the droplet for larger communities costs $12/month. You can also use other hosting companies.
Discourse also offers their own hosting, but the limitation on pageviews is so low, I feel like that should be a deal breaker. You have to think not just about how many people will be using your forum regularly, but about what happens if a post gets shared widely online.
My one big gripe with Discourse is the Wayback Machine can't seem to properly scrape the webpages. This is apparently due to JavaScript.
I would just set this up myself right now, except that a lot of people here have ten times the technical skills I do, not to mention many already own servers or rent VPSes with extra capacity.
