// the find
rafalp/Misago
Misago is fully featured modern forum application that is fast, scalable and responsive.
Misago is a Django-based forum platform that's been actively developed for years, targeting teams or communities that need a self-hosted Discourse alternative with Python in the stack. It covers the full feature set you'd expect: categories, moderation queues, private threads, polls, OAuth2 login, GDPR tools. The 'bananas' (perpetual beta) label is honest — it's usable but the author isn't claiming production-ready stability.
The plugin/hook system is genuinely well thought out — 150+ documented hooks covering nearly every action in the app means you can extend behavior without forking. Django + htmx combo keeps the stack understandable compared to full SPA forums. Docker dev setup with a single `./dev init` command works, and Mailpit is wired in for email testing out of the box. Active maintenance: last push today, CI badges present, and the hook docs are actually current.
The frontend is a hybrid mess — legacy React components bundled with webpack alongside newer htmx pages, no test suite for the JavaScript side per the README's own admission. No plugin system yet in production (it's documented as planned), so the hook docs are aspirational. Search is basic Django ORM-backed; at any meaningful scale you'll be bolting on Elasticsearch yourself. Self-hosting story requires you to manage Celery workers, Redis, and Postgres yourself, and the docs don't make the production deployment path obvious beyond Docker.