Can I just say that you've done a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of old school forums without going overboard into old school UI/UX? The spacing, font choices and just general layout feel modern enough without being overbearing.
It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back.
Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way.
It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.
I think the back button fits perfectly into the UI/UX. It is, quite literally, part of the UI. We don't have much control over the UI portion, but it is firmly in the realm of UX.
UX, maybe. UI? No, not even remotely in the conversation.
The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.
Loading and performance behind loading states are UI concerns, especially on a big distributed system like the modern web. Perhaps you allow native browser elements to provide that UI, perhaps customize it somehow, but a UI designer must consider how the page fills as data arrives. Do you do the ‘spinner hell’ thing? Keep it blank? FOUC? Show cache and update? These are primary UI concerns.
Performance is part of design in software, much like how button feel is part of industrial design, or fabric qualities are part of fashion design. But I also see what you mean, you were talking about visual design.
I would say responsiveness is the number 1 most important UI property. At least for me.
The modern web designers and app builders clearly don't agree with me with their heavy websites that make the browser eat a gig or so of RAM and all have unnecesarily slow UI's.
yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.
I agree with this, also because of the following reason: Wow! A forum, that does not only show a white page, when having JS disabled! The usual current crop of forum software will not even render anything, if you don't allow 3 CDNs and some third party JS to run.
thanks! yeah it's definitely not COMPLETELY true-to-form because i still do think a lot of modern design works for a reason, but i appreciate the words!
that's actually one thing that I don't like about it. it looks like every other generic corporate website or Wordpress template, and certainly nothing like the forums I remember.
As the maintainer of a self-proclaimed "modern" forum software, I always get really excited when new board software comes out.
You've probably discovered that building forum software is a lot more complicated than it looks. Those early boards really had a lot more going on under the hood than you thought!
It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wise.
I'll say what I always say when I discover new board software — give me a run for my money. Good luck!
> It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wise.
This is really interesting to me, because I created an "old" style forum from scratch for a gaming community about a decade ago, and it only took me a month or two to build.
I built it with Python and Angularjs. I think I had pretty much all the typical features: subforums, threads, posts, user profiles, signatures, full moderation tools, etc.
I'm actually genuinely curious about what I did differently from you. Do you have any blog posts or anything like that going into more detail about the hidden complexities that you guys dealt with under the hood?
Edit: Aha, I found your product through your profile and had a quick look. I guess it probably just comes down to amount features - you guys have a LOT more stuff going on that just a typical old forum did.
haha oh totallllyyy. i started writing the backend back in february of last year and i just had issue after issue, but overall super fun to solve the problems
i'm also curious how you got into making a product around it
I'm amazed at your pricing but it looks from your community forum activity that you have a market. Well done in an era where everyone expects stuff for free.
It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity.
For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know" people), this old forum style will never return to its former glory.
The popularity ranking suffers from a few problems.
One problem is that the 1% most popular comments get dozens/hundreds of replies, and no-one responds or even looks at the bottom 90% of comments.
The most popular posts and comments are usually very strong, divisive statements. If you don't have a strong opinion, noone will upvote you, and it will seem that everyone is either strongly for or against something.
Then there's the problem that time is a strong factor in the rankings, which means that there is rarely any long-term followup.
In old forums, there used to be threads that went on for years. Long term follow-up is close to non-existant on HN and Reddit.
What to you describe quickly grows into full-blown recommendation engine.
And IMHO the beauty of the old-school chronological/category organization over the recommendation engines is that it's super simple and predictable, making it a lot less stressful to me, as it's not constantly trying to push your buttons, playing with your FoMO instincts and engagement metrics. If I don't feel like reading something now, it'll still be there in 2 weeks, I can find it easily if I wish.
Recommendation engines aren't all bad. I think one of the keys to making it good for users is to derive recommendations from stated preferences rather than supposed revealed preferences.
That is to say a good recommendation engine would not use viewing, replying to, or otherwise interacting with content other than using a button that says "show me more like this" as an indication the person wants to see more like that. This is, of course not compatible with short-term profits for a site that monetizes time-on-site, but could work with such a profit model over the long term.
Reddit supports rank by reply date. Which i often use, because it can be useful. My argument is that in most cases its not the most useful ranking option.
I can also remind the old forum rules like:
"No useless posts. This includes: Necroing, Thread bumping, useless one liners, Flamewars, Trolling and Spamming."
The above is no longer an issue in the more modern forum ranking methods in combination with nesting. Its frankly just sub-par any way you slice it, since the new ways have the features of the old and add to it. There is no regression only progress, you could argue.
I’ve been an on and off member of car forums. Lots of forums are broken down into sub forms based on model and years, and then sub topic like general discussion, engine problems, mods and so on.
It’s much easier to have a few 100s of people commenting on various parts of the forum than a one single feed like HN.
The vote ranking system is good if you want a steady stream of new curated content and your taste largely coincides with the user base. For instance, you go to “r/catpictures” daily and find the most upvoted cat pictures that users have submitted for that day.
But the vote ranking system is absolutely horrible if you want any sort of in-depth conversation or to have multiple points of view. Conversations on forums might go on for weeks or even years, and people have time to dig up information, view media, ruminate on a point, etc. and come back and add to it later. If you don’t make a comment on a Hacker News post within a few hours, it’s likely that no one is going to read it. Come back a few days later, and you’re just shouting into a void.
Even if you do comment within a few hours, most people are going to just reply to the first couple of comments that were made. Very few people are going to scroll down and read the comments at the bottom.
And if a controversial opinion is split 52%/48%, it’s quite possible for all the comments that are in the 48% are downvoted. Even if one side isn’t 52%, but there’s a small but fanatical fanbase. IE, /r/soda is 10% coke fans that will downvote everything that’s pro-Pepsi, 15% Pepsi fans that will downvote everything pro-Coke, and 75% people who just don’t care. This will lead to all the pro-Coke posts being downvoted and all the pro-Pepsi votes being upvoted. Worse still, since Reddit and HackerNews only use the aggregate score, it will simply appear to most users like no one supports the pro-Coke position.
Of course, neither solves the problem that the most mentally unhealthy individuals are often the ones who spend the most time online, and they’ll be the ones who dominate either style of forum.
I personally got in contact with nested / tree structured forums before the flat, chronological ones. I remember a discussion around 2000 where the flat model got traction. There are up and downsides to each.
Of course this is a pure display issue, there’s no reason one couldn’t switch between both in the same forum.
However there’s something about seeing the same thing others see and interacting with that context in mind.
The issue with having both linear chronological and tree views is that users of either still need to respect the conventions of the other. For linear views it is common to just reply at the end while tree view users will be a lot more tolerant of diverging discussions as those not interested can simply ignore that subtree.
Replying to multiple posts in one comment is also something that tree view discussion boards generally don't support - although it should be possible to do it.
Yeah - if you are old enough to remember the days before StackOverflow, you might remember trying to find answers to (programming-related or other) questions in forums. Where you would have to scroll through pages and pages of more or less (typically less) on-topic replies, and if you were lucky you would find some relevant suggestions, but with no indication if they actually worked for others...
I miss the 2000s forums. They were a great source of information that was easy to read, search and for search engines to index. As the posts where often by enthusiasts they were a treasure trove, especially the automotive forums for repair information. The closest we have now is Reddit but doesn’t feel the same and the UX certainly isn’t as good even comparing to 2000s hobbyists installing vanilla Vbulletin and tweaking colours and a few plugins.
A lot of the forums I visited that died, died because success made hosting to expensive as the only option was vertical scaling the database and hard to moneytorise, then things like private Facebook groups took away the various cliques.
I often wondered if I could create a horizontal scalable forum to make hosting costs trivial. Topics are a natural partition key and old posts are heavily cacheable with only recent posts needing lower cache ttls. I think the deployment complexity would be too much for hobbyist though.
They seem to make a comeback of sorts. I know a few podcasts at least that have gathered their community in "old school" web forums. Some of them literally use the old phpBB, but some use much more modern and mature software, that is a pleasure to use.
They all however still adhere to the linear (non-tree) thread model. You can answer to individual posts and they are then linked together, but all posts still appear in chronological order under the thread.
It really works, and feels much more like a community, like it did in the old days. There are also some really long-lived threads, things don't age out quickly as they do on reddit and HN. Threads are ranked by recent activity, not by upvotes.
I don't know why they make a comeback. Maybe a combination of the realization that the old forums just worked better for community building, and Facebook (which I think was indeed a large driver of the "forum death" of the 2010s) fading.
There are still a lot of these old phpBB style forums in the wild, and some of them are still going strong. I have in mind TDPRI, Steve Hoffman, and Whiteblaze:
I think they mean more like, imagine Reddit, but instead of anyone being able to create a new Subreddit on a new topic, it's anyone can create a new Subforum.
Discourse forums still need each owner to set up and pay for hosting.
If only Fandom wikis were unindexable - then they would not be drowining out community run wikis in search results for games where those still exist.
Running a site that is primarily community content and profiting from ads always seems a bit scummy to me. Particularly odd that this one is co-founded by the same Jimmy Wales better known for Wikipedia.
There are still some quality 90s-style automotive forums around, and many take donations. A steel guitar forum I'm on charges a nominal $5/year. Reddit may have breadth of scale, but these have depth and expertise that makes it worth keeping them going.
I haven't been this excited to jump in and post in a community in a while. There's just something so inviting in commenting on a thread knowing that your post will be there, in order, and won't be lost in the noise even if you didn't show up early.
I had a whole post written out on a thread, but apparently I need to wait for approval. Bit of a bummer but we'll see how long that takes. Good luck!
Requiring approval for the first couple of posts from new users is one of the most sensible anti-spam policies. I'd much rather see more of that than the current forced AI training labor favored by most sites.
This Australian forum is one of the few big ones with general topics and a nice readable design that hasn't changed in decades. Certain sub forums like news get unlocked once you're proven not a troll.
While a lot of forums still exist, I think the amount of active communities has definitely declined.
I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them died because people eventually moved to other platforms. The way I see it, what made a forum great was the community, a constant stream of active posts and engagement. To me they were a hangout spot, a venue of entertainment more than anything else. These hangout spots seemed to have shifted to social media platforms for a lot of people.
Another issue seems to have been a decision by Google to devalue forum posts. Those used to be very common search results 5-10 years ago. It's pretty rare these days.
I've always avoided the "post what you had for dinner" content on forums. That casual stuff didn't work well for most forums. It's good that low quality content moved to social media.
> "decision by Google to devalue forum posts"
Google used to have a checkbox to restrict results to forums only. They removed that years ago, which annoyed many. But you can still add "forum results only" to your search, and Google will more or less try to return forum results as first results.
For example search for: bluebox headphone volume - forum results only
Google's first result is a helpful forum post on that subject. There's nothing stopping you asking search engines to give you exactly what you want. Since search engines are now boasting "AI", they will need to listen harder to people's requests.
Yeah I feel like there’s a corollary to Eternal September where while the common areas of the Internet might be flooded with n00bs, the places that are less than user-friendly may remain intact to the curmudgeonly and the niche. Old school forums are alive in general, even if in specifics many communities are slowly dwindling, completely unmonetizeable, or if they’re dwarfed by Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comment sections, etc.
built in remix.run with a Python backend, basementcommunity is a nod to early forums from the early 2000s like something awful and fark, focusing on manual moderation and discussions happen in chronological order
I like it. Never noticed a forum with a wall of shame before even though I lurked on a few old skool car forums in the mid-2000s.
I do remember a heck of a scrap occurring sometime 2005/6 between 300zx.co.uk and a couple of the other forums of the time. Loads of people banned, even longtime users, site admins, committee members. It was a mess.
Why Remix with a Python backend? Did you need Python for anything specific? Is there some specific need that a pure Remix backend couldn’t give you? Just curious.
actually at the time i wrote the API, i was still considering how the FE was going to be written, so because i never used remix until this point, i didn't realize they offered an all-in-one solution.
honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust
When user visits your page, their first HTTP request hits the Remix, which pulls data from API server and renders initial HTTP response from your React.js UI.
It then sends this response to the client, so you see full site load at one time, even with JavaScript off.
If you have JavaScript enabled, the client version of the React.js UI will load and replace the HTML generated on server, making things interactive. This UI will hit Remix API server for Remix features, but you can still hit your API server from individual components if you need.
I've been playing around with remix and i come from a python backend. would love to know more about how you mix these two ?. Is the backend essentially just a rest API with a handoff to remix for rendering ?.
The old-school sequential form still works, BUT...it needs moderation. All the time.
I still browse similar forums, but the second someone derails a thread, or people start arguing between each others, the browsing experience turns to sh!t.
The reddit / HN format fixed this. People can discuss endlessly between themselves, without ruining the thread. People can post completely irrelevant stuff, without ruining the thread. The import stuff floats to the top, while the less important bits sink to the bottom. With the sequential form, you're pretty much forced to endure - unless mods are quick enough to remove posts.
On Reddit (and lately HN) cretins will up/downvote depending on whether or not they agree or disagree with a post, not because of the quality of the writing. This leads to groupthink and prevents popular ideas being challenged.
Allowing posts to be downvoted simply because somebody disagrees with them (rather than because the post detracts from the discussion) is both pathetic and eventually leads to stagnation.
Hacker News is like a late '90s forum in terms of minimalism, but it has a sick backend. same for Wikipedia and craigslist. That is usually how it is: simple frontend, technical backend
The interface is amazing. Clean, it doesn't leave huge amounts of empty space that scream "this was made for phone users, everyone else might fuck off", and the subforums already hint "we want to gather political dissidents". It feels like the 00s forums without looking like one, it's the best of both worlds.
I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three different errors (capital letters required, special characters required, min length required). However, I feel like a user hitting this issue accidentally would've given up after the third try. Perhaps it could be worth to check for multiple errors at once, and output them all to the user; e.g. "The password must mix case, and contain special characters, and have a minimum length of 8". Just an idea/feedback, mind you.
This one is super annoying. A long password without special characters is not any less secure than a short password with one special character added because it was required.
Better than arbitrary requirements like this would be to estimate the entropy and then just prevent low-entropy passwords (or only tell the user - not everyone needs the same level of security for everything).
I used to hang out on a lot of phpBB and vBulletin forums, and one thing that puzzles me in retrospect is why their performance was so terrible. I can certainly understand how the first versions would be not so great, but the authors released many new versions over the years that tweaked the styling and added a few features but the performance was always awful. Seems like if the authors had put their minds to it those forums could have been super fast, which everyone would have loved because slow forums translated into bigger hosting costs...
Yep. That's how it went with my friends and I hosting phpBB for many years on a linux-based hosting provider.
When I spun up YAF.Net on an AWS IIS server, with a same-machine backend of SQLEXPRESS, it ran like a champ for years with hardly a blip. 16 bucks a month.
It wasn't ever really snappy, per se, but at least it was consistent and didn't bog down.
Oh for sure. But doesn't that increase the returns to making the code more efficient?
I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. My memory tells me it would usually be in the 30-something range, maybe 50-something. It could have been 1!
>I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run.
It might have been Simple Machine Forum (SMF). The footer has the number of queries and number of seconds it took to generate the page (in my case, their community forum index page used 9 queries and took ~0.3 seconds to generate).
Man, I miss those, reminds me of being a teenager. I think they never survived because it was such a tenuous balance, either you didn't have enough people and it was a ghost town, or you had too many and it was a free for all. I feel like things like facebook groups and twitter kinda solved those problems by wrapping them in a larger ecosystem, but at the cost of feeling corporate and generic. The wild west internet couldn't really last, but it had a lot of charm.
I didn’t see what was posted, but I feel like if one’s the type to be bothered by slurs, a self described 2000s style forum probably isn’t what I’d recommend.
Oh you saw that thread by poster 'aaaaa' also? I registered just to tell them to fuck off but by the time I did the thread had been deleted. Way to go moderation!
It seems the forum is too generic, has no specialization, and has no seeded curated content.
So if some CRM company has their demo/demo portal, I also post aaaaaaaaaa to check the basic functionality, not hoping this will ever take off.
I also post very long aaaaaaa....aaaaaaa to see how the interface deals with overflow.
Anyway whatever I post will be refreshed next day.
Yeah it wasn't the guy's username at the time that was the issue, it was the content of the thread he created but I wasn't going to repeat it in polite company here.
I wish there were more "modern" old school forum software alternatives, which you can still just throw onto any LAMP stack hosting provider. I think the closest thing I've found is Flarum.
I'm predicting that in a decade or two, we'll start to notice, that there's a huge gap in retained information, because so many online interactions moved into closed systems, such as social media pages or Discord servers, which aren't well or at all indexed and we might have permanently lost some platforms along the way.
FlaskBB is pretty good. It uses Flask as the name implies which is a Python framework, but beyond that you don't need anything really startling to get it going. It containerises reasonably nicely too.
At the moment, SomethingAwful has probably the worst moderation in the existence of the site. It's a strictly controlled echo chamber that thousands of people have left. It might be legit.
As a super old-timer, that sounds a bit hyperbolic. I guess if you don’t remember aussie jim or Pele then yeah I could see not liking the mods, especially if you’re like, a D&D poster.
Then again, D&D posters have perpetually lived in the worst period of moderation in human history since the migration off UBB.
Joined! Hope the community ends up taking off a bit, it would be fun to have new/smaller community to become a part of. Joining large existing boards often feels pointless due to the insular groups of regulars with a history going back a decade or longer, not that I blame them.
This project idea is one I have for a long time now: Build a proper forum, like the ones I used to frequent back in the day, but with a modern programming language, applying all the coding-fu I have learned since then. However, it is a big task, so I have not yet started ... Maybe I should think of an iterative strategy to get there and go step by step.
I had this random idea where I could start a new forum like this, but make it appear popular by seeding it with hundreds of users who are just ChatGPT. Wouldn't be surprised if this is already being done by some sites. Dead Internet Theory is real.
I actually came across sites like that before, although the coherency of the posts were definitely far worse than ChatGPT as that was before its invention. Looked more like the typical SEO spam than anything else.
So much stuff that they actually never should be able to do.
Like the integration we wrote that would score member uploads by release date and give.. on an FTP server.
PHP Chatbot with IRC integration? nooo problemo ;)
This is so cool. I was just thinking a few months ago how much I miss old school forums. Everybody already said it here but Slack is not searchable, and not suited for communal async communication.
remix has some good built-in APIs for creating SEO-performant pages. everything is server-side rendered for starters, but it's also easy to add meta tags for each page in your react component routes
That looks awesome!
I do miss the "old" web2.0 with it's forums, message boards and the characistic designs.
I always appreciate any throwback/retro web projects! Great work!
Apart from the poor performance which surprised me considering I would expect it to be light, this is awesome and I for one sure miss an internet like this.
i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again
Yeesh. Sad that people seem so determined to prove that you can't have nice things. Hopefully you don't get too discouraged. Happy though that you let my registration through. Kind of expected that my habit of using random usernames would get me flagged.
As is Something Awful, which OP lists as inspiration. The forums are apparently still self sustaining financially, but I don't believe the user count has moved significantly for around a decade.
It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
The main thing is the chronological ordering and lack of karma ordering leads to more freewheeling, breezy conversations. People aren't ego posting as much and are more liberal with speaking their minds, even if their views are unpopular. There are less flamewars, though you also miss out on some deeper discussions. This is also why I like Blind so much, where anonymity has caused it to be the best source of advice on tech careers by a mile. Blunt, harsh advice there has been life-changing.
Additionally, topics being sorted by "what post received a comment most recently" meant that high-quality threads stayed near the top for a long time, leading to much better discoverability. When I want to learn a lot about some obscure hobby, a dedicated forum is an extremely good place to go. Read the top 5-10 threads in most of the categories, and you've got a fantastic jumping off point.
Exactly, Reddit and HN are pretty decent replacements for Slashdot and the like for discussing the day's news, but they're not places for long term projects, megathreads, etc.
vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up.
Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them
and turned our society into a giant flame war
I'm always surprised by this when these types of threads come up on HN. A lot of people seem to remember these forums being moderated poorly, or being run by egomaniacs. My experience is the opposite. The internet forums I spent any time on were generally run by passionate people who cared about the community and donated their time to help keep them running smoothly.
I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.
Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.
Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse.
Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.
Twitter has way less moderation than probably any Vbulletin site. The key is not tripping the algos. But otherwise, you can get away with a lot. There is no such thing as a 'twitter admin' or 'dm the mods' like there is with a regular forum.
But it looks nice. I’m not sure about thread display on mobile though. The table format seems like it takes way too much space for the post count display.
Also, navigating back somehow keeps the existing page after swiping, and then janks back to the previous page after 200ms or so. Not sure what causes that.
I guess that makes it "2000s-inspired". I think it's fine if the visual style of the 2000s eras isn't retained, as long as the character is the same (e.g. linear threads, and threads that are ranked by last reply instead of upvotes).
It loads a huge chunk of obfuscated javascript buildshared something something. I thought that was more recent than early 2000s. Also it loads fonts from google. It all seems way too modern. The main forum I remember using in that era was Webcrossing, which was more like Hacker News in being mostly text, though (my preference) not threaded. Usenet was also still going strong back then.
Added: it is quite hard to use with lynx. I think it is best to not depend on much layout from the browser. I used WebX with lynx all the time and it was fine. Not saying this is a bad forum in general terms, but I think if it is aiming for retro appeal, it doesn't go far enough.
We had an amazing internal 'social media' site at VMware that was basically used like an old-school forum (Socialcast), but then the legal department nuked everything older than ~1 year old, obliterating a huge and beneficial source of org knowledge and more or less ruining the use case (you usually could find an answer for anything you needed, or figure out who to talk to about it if not).
VMware acquired the software company that created the software, failed to market it, and it's only extant as a shadow of itself internally.
A forum is going to be way more searchable. If you want realtime notifications that was solved 50 or more years ago with email or say 20 ish years ago with RSS.
For this reason I prefer JIRA
comments with @-ed colleagues over slack which provides the context and async communication.
An ephemeral slack-like (snapchat for teams!) might be useful for the remote equivalent of talking which is also ephemeral. Knowing that the conversation will be lost and will be interruptive should move most stuff on the forum.
ATC style short radio-style communications might be interesting for this too. “Dan please check broken build. Out”
But yeah there is a lot of cultural bias towards slack like chat systems and at large companies changing that would be like trying to switch away from active directory: unplausable!
I've been thinking about "ephemeral Slack" the last few weeks after a flurry of posts about Slack and workplace communication.
I love the idea. I use Slack a lot for technical discussions with my peers. I've noticed that I seem to be the only person in our department that translates these discussions into Confluence/GitHub documentation.
I'd be very interested to see if an "ephemeral Slack" would force us to be better about documenting our discoveries/decisions/designs etc. It (Confluence) is something everybody at the company complains about, yet few actually attempt to maintain/improve.
Don't get me wrong, Confluence deserves the hate, but we don't have alternatives and, surprisingly I find Confluence a lot nicer to use than trying to search Slack when I run into an issue (provided I know where to look in Confluence, another problem in itself).
I was bummed when StackOverflow got rid of their teams feature, I had always wanted to try that out. I would 100% be on board with a forum for all long-form and persisted communication.
Ideal world: ephemeral chat for day-to-day, forum for persisted comms and institutional documentation, and zero email.
I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion.
Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft.
I guess I'm conflating a few different things here.
I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
Check out DPreview.com. They have threaded view done right. It's much better than this forum for threads because you can see a hierarchical index of all posts, whereas popular threads here only have the first thread easily visible if it's really long and by the time the discussion gets into past depth 3 it's usually quite boring here.
Forums work best when there’s a community that curates things into threads and sub forums when necessary. If they’re basically used as an infinitely long chat record they’re not as strong (though the archiving is inherently better there).
Why wait? AWS and DigitalOcean are dirt cheap. Go set something up and have fun. A number of communities have already forked from Reddit and seem to be doing just fine. As long as you have something interesting to talk about then people will come.
I already moved from reddit to neogaf.
It's nice - nobody bans you for saying that GTA should not be censored. And discussions about politics are banned.
I built an “ssh shell” with this in mind. It’s actually just a hello world app that prompts for your name, because it turns out that’s all you need. Someday I may build a modern BBS via ssh.
Yes, I’m aware you can use telnet, but I thought SSH felt more modern.
The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO.
The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo.
Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)
Would ezboard be considered late 90s forum? :o
Because it looks relatively modern to me, in my mind, all the late 90s, early 2000 were basically vBulletin forums, with mesdiscussions for the French side of the world.
Anyone play World of Warcraft back in the day? Remember Elitist Jerks, their forum? Great place for solid gameplay discussion. And the general social threads in the Benefactors Bar were excellent. They had strict writing rules and moderators enforced the use of good grammar and complete sentences.
"Please don't use chatroom abbreviations like "ofc". Mostly a good post, so only a warning - just try to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Thanks. Also, for future reference: the word "I" should be capitalized."
Didn't think I'd see EJ mentioned here. I distinctly recall planning and reading raiding strategies in there fur hours. I think there largest Onyxia thread was started by me.
Glorious times.
It's very pleasant to browse.