Proposal: Remove the unused Flarum forum integration

[mengw15]

The discussion forum integration (#2201) is off by default, no deployment config sets up Flarum, and it has had no feature work since 2024 (the backend sync was already removed in #3165). It also ships bin/forum/flarum.sql, a dump of a development Flarum database under an ASF header, which came up in the v1.3 licensing audit.

I'd like to remove it, as described in #9005. If your deployment still uses the forum, or you'd like to keep it, please reply here.

[Ma77Ball]

This discussion is confusing to me; it makes it seem like the Flarum forum isn't used at all in the codebase. By deployments, do you mean releases or public Texera instances?

[mengw15]

Sorry, that was unclear. The forum code is there (the Forum tab, the dashboard login hook, bin/forum/), but nothing runs Flarum: neither the single-node bundle nor the Helm chart installs it or routes /forum to it, so the tab has nothing to show (hence #5310).

By deployments I mean running Texera instances, public or self-hosted.

[bobbai00]

I support the idea of removing it. cc: @aglinxinyuan

[parshimers]

Seems fine to remove, if it's basically just a remnant.

[chenlica]

We had one deployment in the education domain in which Flarum was enabled. It was indeed very useful. For other deployments, we didn't enable it as it's NOT very needed. But I don't want to use it as a reason to remove it from the codebase.

We need to discuss the following aspects:

1. Is this feature very useful, possibly in the future? My answer is Yes.

2. If we don't want to use this "in-house solution," how can we outsource it to any third-party service provider?

3. Is any downside to keep it and maintain it? My understanding is that Flarum's backend database is MySQL. We changed the metadata database from MySQL to Postgres. I don't think that's an issue though.

@aglinxinyuan Please chime in.

[aglinxinyuan]

It’s not difficult to maintain; we just need to do some cleanup on the mirror. The main concern is licensing. I’m not sure what license applies to a dump of their database or whether redistributing or maintaining a copy is even permitted. We’d need to keep a modified copy of their database to preserve certain settings, since those settings are stored in the database.

[chenlica]

If we can solve the license issue, I think this feature is useful. I vote for keeping it.