It’s fair enough and no offence taken, there weren’t a lot of options on the table which passed all the tests; if I remember right we basically ended up with Flarum, Discourse, and phpBB as the things which could do the job, with the former two being more suited than the latter. I do find a lot of BB instances out there though and it’s a perfectly-decent tool.
In terms of other companies/orgs/whatever doing the same thing it seems like it’s either Discourse or Discord. We didn’t really want to make this some kind of real-time chat space as that’s quite involved for all, and obviously it wouldn’t have been Discord for reasons outlined here: What if we create a discord server for Mojeek?
Other suggested tools there are great though 