// the find
mlogclub/bbs-go
A lightweight community and Q&A platform for forums, knowledge bases, and discussions.
bbs-go is a self-hosted forum/Q&A/knowledge-base platform written in Go with a React frontend. It covers the middle ground between GitHub Discussions (too minimal) and Discourse (too heavy) for teams wanting a private community space they can deploy in an afternoon. Aimed at product teams, dev communities, or internal knowledge hubs.
Single Go binary with MySQL makes ops genuinely simple compared to Discourse's Redis+Sidekiq+Postgres stack. The layered architecture (handlers → services → repositories) is clean and navigable — you won't get lost. Built-in gamification (points, levels, badges, tasks) is opt-in and configurable, not baked into every query. Docker Compose one-liner actually works, and the install wizard covers first-run DB setup without manual SQL.
Search is plaintext MySQL LIKE queries — there's no full-text index or Elasticsearch integration, so it'll fall apart on any community with real volume. MySQL-only is a genuine constraint; no Postgres support means you can't use pgvector or JSON operators if you want to extend it later. The English README and docs are clearly translated from Chinese and still have rough edges — the live demo requires emailing someone for admin access, which is a bad signal for an international push. Test coverage is thin: a handful of unit tests against handlers, almost nothing covering the service layer where the actual logic lives.