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JeffreyWay/council
An open source forum built on Laravel.
Council is the forum software that powered Laracasts.com, built by Jeffrey Way as a teaching project. It covers the full stack of a real forum: threads, replies, channels, spam detection, user reputation, notifications, mentions, and search via Laravel Scout. It's aimed at Laravel developers who want to see how a production-grade forum is actually structured.
The test suite is genuinely thorough — feature tests cover almost every user flow (lock/pin/subscribe/mention/reputation) which makes the codebase readable as a spec. Spam detection is a nice multi-inspection pipeline rather than a simple keyword blacklist. The activity feed and reputation system are implemented cleanly without turning the models into god objects. Vue component boundaries are sensible — the JS is component-per-feature rather than one giant SPA.
Dead since February 2021 — requires PHP 7 and an old Laravel version, so you're immediately fighting deprecation warnings on any modern stack. Laravel Scout is wired up but the README gives you nothing on which search driver to configure, so search is effectively broken out of the box unless you already know Scout. Admin tooling is nearly absent: one dashboard page with channel management, nothing for moderation, user management, or spam queues, which means running this publicly requires building those yourself. The Vue components use the Options API and a custom event bus pattern that predates Composition API and Pinia — fine to read, but you wouldn't ship it like this today.