Up until maybe 10 years ago basically all forums were just HTML, CSS, a tonne of emoji images, and a light sprinkling of JavaScript to implement a rich text edi

Up until maybe 10 years ago basically all forums were just HTML, CSS, a tonne of emoji images, and a light sprinkling of JavaScript to implement a rich text editor. All the heavy lifting was done server side. And it usually scaled pretty well, considering if you needed to upgrade to a bigger machine you physically had to have someone switch out hardware.