Be aware that some countries make you liable for what people post on your forum.

Also, have you looked at Discourse? There are some nice apps that work with it and make the experience on mobile slightly better.

If I interpret this toot correctly, there wasn’t a direct commit from a sanctioned region, but one developer was in one of those regions for a short while quite some time ago. And he may have been flagged because of this.

MacBook Pro: mbp.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 2: rpi2.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 3: rpi3.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 4: rpi4.domain.com
Raspberry Pi 5: rpi5.domain.com
(Yes, I have one of each.)
Synology DS415+: ds415.domain.com
Phone: iphone.domain.com
Watch: watch.domain.com
AppleTV: appletv.domain.com
Nintendo Switch: switch.domain.com

Unless you’re using outdated server software, there’s nothing inherently insecure with exposing ports to the Internet. Be it port 80 or 443. Just keep everything up to date and maybe add fail2ban to stop people poking around.