I know how it feels when people ask you to open the source of your project. They don't always realize how much they're asking or what you trade. In my opinion you don't really get anything out of the source being open unless people really are going to contribute. And then of course managing contributions adds another layer of complexity to what is otherwise a simple personal project.

TLDR, I understand all the reasons to say no. But I'm just curious. I like to mess with code.

i've given such a wishy washy answer on this before, but it's looking like "likely not"

the only thing that would make me open source the whole thing is if I can find the motivation to create a "base theme." I don't want any other site online to copy basement community's look and feel, but I REALLY want to give people the ability to host their own instances of this forum software and either put a default out-of-the-box frontend in front of it, or extend it to look how they want

imo, basement community's API and feature-set are a lot better than most forum software out there and I feel very confident about this. The other thing is, I've got the API, database, nginx, and Redis running in Docker all with single command, so getting a basement community backend up and running should be dead simple.

So that's all to say if anyone (including myself) had the energy to create a simple, extendable theme, I would absolutely open source the backend and maybe even some of the front-end components, like the post parser that handles markdown, @ notifications, and <quoting /> tags

the unfortunate thing is it's a lot of work

this logic also applies to creating a mobile app too. if anyone wanted to take a shot at creating one, I would absolutely invite that person to collaborate on both the back-end and front-end application

the last thing i will add is the front-end of the site still needs some work, i'm well aware