[technion]

    > one-click install to any hosting plan (yes using PHP if necessary).

I think you had to be fair on this - that requirement accounts for a large amount of the design compromises that make other products so poor.

Breaches on popular PHP forum software account for a disproportionate amount of the breaches we regularly hear about. It's caused issues for Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and the "Cosbycoin" compromise is hard to forget. I can't complain about any particular vendor because they have all had their share of issues in this space.

Yes, you can write good PHP - but start saying "one click on any hosting plan" and suddenly composer is out the door, every file is owned by the user the web servers runs as and you start pollyfilling for ancient versions. It means you can't assume SSL will exist, it means you can't get updates using git or any sane automation strategy, and look at how Wordpress deals with cron.

Wordpress is regularly lambasted for their support of ancient versions of PHP, which is something they do primarily to meet this goal.

In interested in what other options are out there. I rarely see Discourse on the open Internet and I cringe every time I get tempted to sign up to an old SMF or vBulletin installation.