For clans, guilds and squads
The raid is Tuesday.Where is that written down?
Pins fill up. The recruitment post scrolls away. The build that carried you through the last tier is somewhere up a channel nobody can search. Meith gives your clan a place for the things that need to still be true next week — and your Discord carries on doing what it is good at.
“It's in the pins. There are ninety pins.”
A pinned message is a bookmark, not a filing system. Here the roster is a thread in a forum called Raid nights and the build is a thread in Builds, and neither of them moves because somebody said something else.
“Applicants can't see anything until they join.”
Your public forums are readable by anybody with the link — no account, no invite. Somebody deciding whether to apply can read the rules, the raid times and a month of activity first, which is the only honest way to recruit.
“That build guide is three months up the channel.”
Threads stay where they were put and search goes back through all of them. A guide written for the last tier is still there when the next one lands, with the date on it so you know what it was written against.
“The officers need somewhere that isn't a group DM.”
A private forum only officers can see: applications discussed, calls made, and the reasoning still there for whoever takes over. Nobody has to be added to a DM to catch up on two years of it.
Recruitment
People can read the place before they join it.
This is the thing a private server cannot do at any setting. An invite link shows a prospective member nothing at all: they either join blind or they do not join. A board lets them read the rules, the schedule and a month of real activity, and then apply.
- The front of the clan is public
- Rules, raid times, what you are looking for, and enough recent activity to prove the clan is alive — all of it indexed, and all of it linkable from wherever you post the advert.
- The back of it is not
- Applications can be a forum only officers read and reply in, or one the whole clan weighs in on. Who can read, post and reply is decided per forum, so both arrangements are the same feature set differently.
And when an officer stands down, none of it leaves with them.
What the clan gets
A front door, and a room behind it.
Four of the things that matter when half your problem is who can see what. 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 →
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 →
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 →
Add what you are missing, without the fear
Plugins add the things your community needs and stay in their lane. One that misbehaves fails on its own: the page still renders, the thread still posts, the board carries on as though it had never been installed.
What plugins can do →
Coming from Discord
Keep the server. Obviously.
Voice is voice and nothing replaces it. There is no clean export out of Discord either, and you would not want one — a channel poured into a forum is still a channel. Start the board with the things that keep being asked for: the roster, the rules, and the two or three build guides everybody links every week.
Then let it grow whenever somebody says something in chat that ought to have been written down.
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.
Sports clubs
Fixtures, notices, subs and a committee room — for GAA, soccer, and any club run by volunteers in their own time.
Meith for sports clubs →
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 →
Give the clan somewhere the roster stays put.
On a machine of your own, at your own address, in about half an hour. Have a look at a real board first.
- A machine
- Your own, with Docker
- A domain
- Pointed at it
- Everything else
- Comes up beside it