Good day! Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with a discussion board solution?

As a developer building one, which is probably what you're asking, no. As a participant, XenForo is the best I've run into, but it may take a fair amount of customization, and possibly paid add-ons to really make it go.

We use Discourse for our Ortus community forum. As much as I wanted to use a CF solution, there's just really nothing out there that's maintained and it didn't make sense to spend the amount of time it would take.

At one time, at least in one place I ran into, you had to pay to participate in a discourse board. Don't know if that's still true, or if the place imposed that themselves. Was long ago enough that I don't think I know where that was, so I should probably just go away.

They offer hosted versions of Discourse- perhaps that's what you saw. We pay nothing but the Digital Ocean droplet we run Discourse on. I just manually installed it, which was a pretty straight forward shell script that took care of everything. It's honestly pretty nice. You just clone the repo and run the script. They use yaml files for configuring everything

Thank you for the feedback!