For maintainers, and the communities around their code
Your best answers deservebetter than a chat scrollback.
A question answered in chat is answered again next week. Meith gives a project a real forum: threads with URLs worth pinning in an issue, search that reaches back years, pages that render as plain HTML so everything is fast and indexable — on your own domain, under the MIT licence, run by you.
“We answer the same question every release.”
A thread has a URL. Answer once, link it from the release notes, and search puts the thread that settles it ahead of a passing mention of it.
“Our community lives on a platform we cannot export.”
The board is PostgreSQL on a server you rent: back it up, move it, or take it apart with the operator CLI whenever you like. Nothing lives anywhere else.
“Contributors will not make an account on somebody else's service.”
Reading needs no account at all, and sign-in is your board's own — passwords, passkeys, or GitHub as a federated provider.
“A forum is one more service to babysit.”
Four containers with health checks, backups as CLI commands, and versioned upgrades with the procedure written down. An evening a month, not a pager.
Server-first
Readable by everyone, indexable by everything.
Every thread is server-rendered HTML: quick on a bad connection, legible to crawlers, working with JavaScript switched off. The performance budgets are measured against a board with years of history, and a release that breaks one is never published. For the bots and dashboards a project inevitably grows, the REST API covers anything an administrator can do by hand.
Coming from somewhere else?
There is no clean way out of a Facebook group, a Discord server or a Slack. Most communities start fresh, run both for a season, and move what was worth keeping. A MyBB or phpBB board imports whole — working passwords included.
Not quite you?
The same board, argued four other ways.
One piece of software. What changes is which of its problems you recognise.
MyBB & phpBB boards
The way out of a PHP forum nobody wants to maintain: members, posts and working passwords, imported whole.
Meith for MyBB and phpBB boards →
Product & SaaS communities
A support community on your domain, behind your identity provider, wearing your brand — with no per-member pricing.
Meith for product and SaaS communities →
Agencies & dev shops
One engine, a board per client: each a small config repo you can theme, deploy, upgrade — and hand over whole.
Meith for agencies and dev shops →
Clubs & communities
The volunteer-run version: clubs, associations, clans and groups that need one place everybody can reach.
Meith for clubs and communities →
Give the project a place answers accumulate.
Scaffold it, run it in fixture mode over a coffee, and put it on the project's own domain. Read the source first — it is MIT, like yours.
- A repository
- npx create-meith, pushed to your GitHub
- A server
- Rented in the community's name, from a few euro a month
- An evening
- Once — an upgrade is a version bump