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Those forums were expensive. It wasn't until I had been contributing to them for years until I thought to ask just how much a vBulletin license cost. And phpBB
by vinceguidry 8y ago
Those forums were expensive. It wasn't until I had been contributing to them for years until I thought to ask just how much a vBulletin license cost. And phpBB was hard to administer, had security problems, which were exacerbated by the lack of experience of forum administrators. And you had to maintain hosting, which wasn't a trivial expense back in those days.
- mattnewton 8y agoThere were ample ad supported solutions that were pretty painless. Source: set up several invision free forums for my friends in 5th grade. Never touched a server and had no idea what we were doing, but used it constantly to stay in touch.
- vinceguidry 8y agoI'm not saying there weren't options. But you had to hear about them and learn how to use them, and then people would complain endlessly about your choices anyway. Facebook democratized social networking.
- herbst 8y agoSame with Facebook?
- jmathai 8y agoI think the general feedback in these post are that people were using numerous tools in the decades before Facebook and they worked pretty well. I, myself, can concur what everyone's saying. I didn't have to set up a forum to chat with people who liked Tori Amos .... atforumz existed[1]. At that time I don't recall the social networks being about your local community, friends and family like Facebook is today. It was about people you would never have met - because that's what made the Internet magical at the time. It could easily have morphed into forums of friends and family - not that it would have rivaled Facebook but it could have met the need. Socially speaking, I think the Internet is much less interesting now than it was 20 years ago. [1] http://toriforum.proboards.com/thread/1138 http://toriforum.proboards.com/thread/1138