For GAA clubs, soccer clubs, and everything run by a committee
The fixture changed.Did everybody see it?
Between the WhatsApp group, the Facebook page and the members who are on neither, a club spends half its energy telling people the same thing three times. Meith gives your club one place everybody can reach — fixtures that stay put, notices that arrive, a committee room nobody else can read, and the subs taken online.
“I sent it three times and they still went to the wrong pitch.”
A notice on a board is not competing with anything. It stays in the forum you put it in, it is still there on Saturday morning, and it can go out by email to the whole club at once — including the members who never open the app.
“The subs are a spreadsheet and a shoebox.”
Take membership online and let it look after itself. A member pays, the members' area opens for them, and the whole thing lapses on its own when the year is up. Nobody sits down with a list in January.
“Half the club isn't on Facebook, and never will be.”
Your board is a link. A member opens it in the browser they already have — no account with any company, no app to install, and no parent shut out of the juvenile section because they will not sign up to something.
“Nobody can find the minutes from March.”
Every decision is a thread, in a forum only the committee can see, and search goes back through all of it. Next year's officers inherit the answers instead of the questions.
Membership
Take the subs online, and stop chasing them.
Dues comes with the software: membership sold through Stripe, as a monthly or yearly subscription, a pass from a day to two years, or a lifetime. You set the plans in the panel — name, price, currency, length — and a member can buy one for themselves or gift one to somebody by name.
- Paying opens the door by itself
- A paid membership puts that person in a group, and the group is what carries the members-only forum, the badge, the name colour. Nobody chases a spreadsheet, and nobody is added by hand.
- It lapses without being watched
- Every membership runs out on its own. Remove the plugin, stop its tasks, or lose the Stripe account entirely, and each one drains away at its own boundary — the board is left correct rather than left open.
And the money is between your club and Stripe. There is no cut, no platform in the middle, and no per-member fee at any point.
What your club gets
Built for a committee, not for a support desk.
Four of the things a club notices in the first week. Each is also a link, because the page asserts and the document argues.
A room for everyone, and one for the committee
Open forums for the whole community, a members-only floor, a committee room nobody else knows is there. Who can read, post, search or reply is decided per member, per forum — and every way into the board, search and feeds included, obeys the same rules.
How permissions work →
Bots stay out, people get in
A trap only bots fall into, questions you write about your own community, and a first post held for somebody to glance at — which matters more in a juvenile section than it does anywhere else. No puzzle grids, and no stranger deciding who is human enough to join.
How the spam controls work →
It looks like your community, not like software
Your colours, your crest, light and dark — restyle the whole thing or install a different theme entirely. A theme can only change how the board looks, never whether it works, so a new coat of paint can never cost you the board.
How themes work →
Years of answers, still findable
Search that knows a thread about your question beats a passing mention of it, and stays quick however deep the archive goes. The answer somebody wrote years ago keeps earning its keep.
How search holds up →
Coming from WhatsApp and Facebook
Keep them. Move what matters.
There is no clean way to get a club's history out of a WhatsApp group or a Facebook page, and that is their decision rather than ours. In practice it matters less than it sounds: most clubs start the board fresh, put this season's fixtures and the current notices on it, and carry across the handful of things that were always worth keeping.
And the group chat carries on. It is good at lifts and last-minute changes. It was never any good at being the place you go to look something up.
The bit people worry about
“But who's going to run it?”
Somebody in your community already does this for a living, or near enough — every club has one and every project has three. This is a job for them, and it is smaller than they will expect: about half an hour, once, and then it runs. What it needs is a server, a domain, and nobody's permission.
The whole job, by hand. The guided route is the same four containers, with the panel typing the secrets in for you.
Guided, with Coolify
A panel installed on the same server — still your machine, not a service you sign up to. Point it at the repository and it generates the secrets and the database password, issues the certificate, tells the board its own address, and redeploys on push.
Nothing is typed in. About twenty minutes.
Or by hand, if they would rather
The same four containers without the panel — Postgres, a one-shot migration the others wait on, the web server, and the worker that runs the background tick. A clone, an .env with three generated secrets, one command, and a reverse proxy they already run.
Postgres and nothing else — no Redis, no broker, no search cluster.
What it costs
A small board is happy on a VPS of about €15 a month, and a busy one wants a bigger machine — that part scales with your board the way anything does.
What never changes is what the bill follows. It follows the machine, never the membership: two hundred members cost exactly what twenty do, and there is no tier that unlocks the private forum.
Still quick a decade in
Reading never drags.
Long threads, deep pages, a search across everything ever written — pages come back before anyone wonders whether the board is busy, and they keep doing it as the archive grows. Ten years of history is a feature of your community rather than a weight on it.
Measured, not asserted: against a board of 2.3M posts, a thread page renders in 3.3 ms at the 95th percentile — and a run over its 50 ms budget fails the build.
Coming from somewhere else
Bring the archive if you have one.
A MyBB board imports whole, and the importer is resumable, so a decade of history moves across several sittings rather than one long night. Old links keep working, so every URL anybody ever posted still lands.
Coming from a chat platform or a Facebook group is different, and it is worth being straight about it: there is usually no clean way to get your history out of one. That is their decision rather than ours.
The licence
Yours to keep.
Meith is free software under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3. Run a board on it for anything at all, commercially included, without publishing a line of your configuration or a word your members wrote. Nobody can put a price on it later, and nobody can switch it off.
- Themes and plugins are yours
- Both fill an interface this software provides, which is the case the Lesser GPL exists to allow. License yours however you like — it is not obliged to be LGPL because the board it runs in is.
- Changes to Meith come back
- Modify the board itself and those changes carry the same licence to whoever you hand the modified version to. That is the copyleft, and it is the whole of what is asked.
Which is the point of choosing it: the version you are running stays free software whatever anybody decides later, and anybody can carry it on.
Read the licence — GNU Lesser General Public License v3
LGPLv3 is additional permissions on top of the GNU GPL, which it incorporates. Both texts are in the repository, and both travel with any copy you pass on.
Not quite you?
The same board, argued four other ways.
It is one piece of software underneath. What changes is which of its problems you recognise — so there is a page for each.
Residents' associations
A noticeboard the whole road can reach — including the neighbours who will not go near Facebook.
Meith for residents' associations →
Discord & Slack communities
Keep the server. Give the answers worth keeping somewhere they will still be next year.
Meith for Discord & Slack communities →
Facebook groups
You built the group. Facebook owns the reach, the members and the archive — and can close it tomorrow.
Meith for Facebook groups →
Gaming clans
Rosters, builds and recruitment that do not scroll up the channel — and something an applicant can read before they join.
Meith for gaming clans →
Give your club one place everybody can reach.
At your own address, on a machine of your own, in about half an hour. Have a look at a real board first — and read the source before you run it.
- A machine
- Your own, with Docker
- A domain
- Pointed at it
- Everything else
- Comes up beside it