Best WordPress Forum Plugins to Build a Thriving Online Community

Being online helps people to remain connected with each other, be it the forum, chat room, email or social network, like-minded people can connect over the discussion of specific topics through the online forums. WordPress forums, in particular, has become significantly alluring because of the logged conversations, easy integrations with the websites and successful community building scope.

While there are plenty of forums, you can choose from. If you are planning to make one for your own, this blog will help you consider the right WordPress forum plugins. When done rightly, you can integrate these plugins in the community portion of your existing website.

That said, if you are planning to turn your entire website into a community forum, you have to use a WordPress forum theme and not just a plugin. Since these forums have evolved in the past years, you can find various formats such as question-answer layout, stack overflow, up-down vote arrangement and more.

Choosing the Right WordPress Forum Plugin

The foremost things for plugins are that it requires testing about the user experience. It is also incredibly important since you have to manage the community and make the forum visually appealing so that people would come back here often whenever they have a relevant query. The following options can help you set up the process for forum management.

bbPress

This is one of the most popular plugins used for WordPress forum. This is because it has been here for a while and especially during the days when there were not many options. The front end is comfortable and has a lightweight build and bloated interface. There are some essential customisation tools available that help you get keyboard shortcuts, adjust the colours and also have a visual editor for the users who are writing. Most importantly, bbPress is a free plugin and is an open-source project; that is, many developers can contribute to the plugin. Also, it integrates with all the popular and reputable themes of WordPress without slowing down the site. The customisable templates can help you change the style, colour and other settings. It can be used for multisite forums, and each of these forums, there is one dashboard.

Discussion Board

Planning to add a forum to your WordPress site, the Discussion Board is one of the most popular choices for developers. With its one-click installation and some other essential features, it can automatically create the following pages when activated-

• Log-in page
• Page with a form where users can post topics
• Page to view existing topics

What makes this plugin unique is it offers separate control on who can view the WordPress forum and who can post there. This plugin is particularly helpful for Community forums, Discussion forums and groups, Niche sites, eCommerce sites, Bulletin boards and Job boards.

Sabai Discuss

A premium questions and answers plugin used in WordPress, Sabai Discuss is an ideal tool. With its fully responsive and flat design, it is also used for building a knowledge base, discussion forum, and also get a helpdesk portal for WordPress. You can refine questions and answers by the custom fields, Tag questions with auto-suggest answers and also create hierarchical categories.

WPForo Forum

Yet another free WordPress plugin for a forum, but here you can find add-ons which are not seen in the previous two. This add-on section offers items such as customising user fields, polls, managing advertisements, private messaging and more. This has a more modern designed approach with brighter colours and more organised threads. There are few layouts to start with, which are both modern and responsive in design. You can also find translations in various languages such as Swedish to Czech, Polish to Russian. The best feature is that the WPForo Forum plugin is designed in a way that can be used by both small and huge forum communities. The built-in SEO and caching functions can keep the forum running with the best of the speed.

Asgaros Forum

This is a very professional choice if you are looking for a lightweight forum page. To add this, you need to insert a shortcode in the desired page, and it keeps everything fast and easy for the admin. It has a straightforward yet elegant structure that comes with a proper notification system and a mighty editor. The users can create a profile and can also so have actions such as upload, messaging, searches. Asgaros Forum is an entirely free plugin and works with the other widgets by adding different models to the side of the forum. It is also a multisite compatible plugin and can provide a responsive mobile theme for users.

DW Question and Answer

For the websites that require a plugin which can make a community like Quora or Yahoo Answers, this is the easiest choice. Typically, these websites come with the voting system, and the best answer appears on the top. This feature makes it different from any regular forum. Generally, DW Question and Answer has a huge list of answers to the question in the forum. With this plugin, you can have more control over the responses because there will be people with trolls and unnecessary replies. This is also a free, open-source project and comes with more additional free plugins for options like social sharing, markdown, leaderboards and captcha. You can find the number of languages that are supported in this plugin such as Catalan, Thai, Czech and Vietnamese. Also, you can find various shortcodes that can be quickly inserted in the forum as and when required.

Concluding

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