Indie-Resource.com

Howdy friends, was wondering what everyone would recommend as far as forum software for a game that can integrate well with my user database? Of course the more secure the better.

Or should I try and roll my own?

I want to have a place where my users can meet up and talk about the game.

I would be interested in this too. Many people are going to suggest you create your own but there has got to be a quicker way.

Yeah, I think making your own is a terrible idea. It would take a couple of years of hard work to get close to feature parity with what is freely available. But even beyond freely available, there are even commercial ones that I think could be worth the money. Anyway, in no order here are a couple that I think are really modern and nice looking:

NodeBB: Don't be fooled by the "pricing" option at the top of the page. NodeBB is open source and can freely be installed on your own servers. The commercial options are for cloud hosting. But NBB has nice web socket features that you would expect from node, including chat, live message notifications, etc.

XenForo: I was on a forum for a while that used this system and it was amazing. This is a commercial ones but the pricing isn't too bad ($140 for the first year + $40 each year thereafter). I heard from the admin of that forum that it wasn't hard to get setup or manage at all. It includes achievements, real-time notifications, and a ton of other stuff. There are even nice (paid) plugins that add in Facebook-style pop-up chat.

I am sure there are tons of others with similar feature sets but these are the ones I have looked in to or have spent time on a forum powered by them.