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I recently started interacting with a vBulletin forum (https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/ https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/). It’s just a

I recently started interacting with a vBulletin forum (https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/ https://www.bentrideronline.com/messageboard/). It’s just as bad as I remember from all those years ago. Bad layout, bad markup so that it’s difficult for me to make it nicer in user stylesheets (most notably, I want to make it more compact), a bad HTTP/HTTPS situation, unreasonably tight restrictions (e.g. “you can’t post links until you’ve posted 15 messages”), crazy pagination and thread organisation behaviour which prevents you from having meaningful persistent links (“?page=4” is hopeless when it depends on the user’s comments-per-page and linear-or-threaded settings), and other weird defaults (e.g. pretend threads from over a year ago don’t exist, unless you opt into seeing them; or showing only 10 comments per page by default, with the maximum being only 40), defaulting replies to a quote-everything style… it’s just not nice to deal with, even apart from using that old relic BBCode (thank goodness for the “preview” option, anyway—it’s essential). Unfortunately, all the alternatives I know of are irritating in their own ways too (e.g. Discourse is far too spacious, loads slowly, and has painful lazy loading).

toyg 6y ago
Restrictions are not that unreasonable when you consider web forums are massive spam targets. But I agree web forums were successful despite their implementations. There was (and arguably there still is) a primal thirst for communication among people, that will drive demand for social software likely forever.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  My own observation from acting as a moderator in a couple of places over the years is that the first post of an account is almost always sufficient to tell whether an account is a spammer or not. I would say that a better approach would be to moderate users’ first posts—or perhaps to do spam analysis and moderate any that are not overwhelmingly ham. But even without that, requiring fifteen messages before allowing links is going well beyond what could be argued as helping with spam protection.
chrisco255 6y ago
Haha, yeah, I'm not saying there shouldn't be better alternatives and that I miss vBulletin itself. I just miss the communities and how interesting they all were. Had high hopes for Discourse, it's unfortunate the performance isn't there.

toyg 6y ago

Restrictions are not that unreasonable when you consider web forums are massive spam targets. But I agree web forums were successful despite their implementations. There was (and arguably there still is) a primal thirst for communication among people, that will drive demand for social software likely forever.

chrismorgan 6y ago
My own observation from acting as a moderator in a couple of places over the years is that the first post of an account is almost always sufficient to tell whether an account is a spammer or not. I would say that a better approach would be to moderate users’ first posts—or perhaps to do spam analysis and moderate any that are not overwhelmingly ham. But even without that, requiring fifteen messages before allowing links is going well beyond what could be argued as helping with spam protection.

chrisco255 6y ago

Haha, yeah, I'm not saying there shouldn't be better alternatives and that I miss vBulletin itself. I just miss the communities and how interesting they all were. Had high hopes for Discourse, it's unfortunate the performance isn't there.