Starting a forum, inspired by the look of tal.ki embedded forums, some questions?

So I have a few questions someone can maybe guide me a little bit on?

I've been looking at a lot of forum solutions. I love Xenforo but can't afford it right now. Maybe later. Some Vanilla+themes comes pretty close to what I want. Same with myBB. But one of the best options I found (for what I need) was an embedded forum option from tal.ki.

I tried their example forum (http://tal.ki/forum-example/#/general/) on my front page where I needed a forum, and it looked great, fit right in, and it looks how I want it to.

Zero support from their company, and their own support forums are overrun with spam. The only moderator stopped posting years ago.

I want the forums (or at least new posts/topics entered through my site) to be kept on my site, with me, especially for SEO purposes.

I really love their social login and want to keep that, but using their forum code, I believe, gives them all the user information when someone registers on my site to use their forum. I want that for mailing lists and the like.

Those are my big issues. So I WOULD go with a normal hosted forum solution like Vanilla, and still might, but there's one thing. Using that example script up above gave my site and visitors and really appealing look of an already populated forum, with actual real/live posts on it, pretty up to the minute/active - I want to keep that look/function somehow, it's far more engaging and I'm sure my conversion rate (with my particular domain) would be much improved by having that.

Any thoughts on any of this, or suggestions? Their forum loads in iframe... Closest thing I was thinking was maybe have it load up on my main page, but somehow having a force-login box over the forum section, so then they register, and are redirected to my site's not as full/active forums... Feels like a dirty trick, but if I could just reach a tipping point of users registering that way, it'd fuel a transition slowly to all my own topics embedded on the front page. Anyway, that was only one half-baked idea I had. I'm not a programmer at all so I don't know what's possible with this technology, and iframes, etc etc.

Thanks for any help or conversation!

 

If your needs are:

1. Free
2. Active support + mods/themes community
3. Embedded & mobile version

Then Vanilla fits the bill. The hosted Vanilla solution costs $50 a month which is a bit much for a new forum. Download the free, open-source version from VanillaForums.org. Not only is it free, there is an active mod, theme, and support community. I make Vanilla themes on the website in my signature. Vanilla allows you to embed your forum into a Wordpress blog or other website. It supports a single sign-on system, social network login, and the other features you described.