12 ms·

As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, f

by danr4 5y ago

As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033

dreyfan 5y ago
I've yet to see a forum software that works as well as vBulletin and the clones of that did in the early to mid 2000s. Everything today is this weird "conversation" view and comments/threads constantly move around based on the whims of a voting audience.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I'm extremely surprised by this weird dichotomy. vbulletin era was "low" on tech yet there were a lot of nice chill places.. there was almost nothing special, no ease, few rules, convos were mostly humans and fun. Now there's kilotons of resources (brain and money) trying to make all this go to mars and yet it only creates frailty. Super odd.
  - codinghorror 5y ago
    The software didn't change; the people did. Starting in 2014, everyone went online.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      What happened in 2014? I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
      - ShroudedNight 5y ago
        Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness. I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
    - hsn915 5y ago
      Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum. But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter. People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
      - krrrh 5y ago
        It seems like a giant confidence game to this day. 80% of adults in the US don’t use Twitter, and of those that do, only a much smaller number are regular users, and an even smaller percentage care to follow brands, which most people rightly see as opt-in advertising. The timeline algorithm makes it even less likely that the pointless post from @reebok is going to reach many people, probably nothing close to the amount of free irl advertising that they gave to Twitter and Facebook.
        mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Yes I’ve poked at twitter a few times but never saw the point. Have been drowned by news of them for almost a decade, right? Self promoters and journalists just desperate for “engagement” to their own detriment.
        hsn915 5y ago
        What shook me even more was seeing companies hire people for the sole purpose of crafting tweets. They call it "PR".
- codinghorror 5y ago
  errr. in Discourse conversations are strictly chronological, 100% of the time.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  So why not continue using it today, until something better comes along?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 5y ago
    It's not "web 3.0" ~
    - account42 5y ago
      Meaning that you can use it with javascrit disabled?
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  vBulletin is still available, isn't it?
  - dreyfan 5y ago
    Yep, works great. Nobody uses it for anything new though.
    - bsder 5y ago
      Presumably mobile compatibility was the issue, no? Everybody nowadays wants to do everything on their phone. Also, didn't vBulletin have a lot of spam and security issues? It's kind of like WordPress in that using it is nice but managing it is hell.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      The last vBullitin site I used was hacked and never came back online. The overhead from running forum software in the age of mass automated abuse is just too great. It's really hard to justify the value of a forum that gets hacked, spammed, costs money, etc when Discord is free and works better for most people.
  - AvocadoCake 5y ago
    ProBoards exists and is nice to use, but it's not obvious to me it does anything better for software than Github issues.
  - tyteen4a03 5y ago
    From vB4 onwards it has becoming more and more of a hot pile of crap. XenForo is where it's at. Never used IPB but heard they're slipping.
- PeterCorless 5y ago
  https://xenforo.com/ https://xenforo.com/ — Paradox Interactive uses it for their Stellaris/HOI4/EU4/CK3 communities. edit: e.g., https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universalis-iv.731/ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universal...
  - the_pwner224 5y ago
    Xenforo is also used for a lot of vehicle-specific forums. It works very well; modern design / features while still having good usability & UX.
  - bob1029 5y ago
    I've set up a few instances of xenforo in the past (2013 ish). Really good kit. I didn't know it was still a thing.
- buro9 5y ago
  I have something in Go that isn't too bad... it looks like this https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com and powers sites like this http://forum.espruino.com/ http://forum.espruino.com/ Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side though... it was designed as a platform rather than a standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to use.
  - mftb 5y ago
    Those home pages look pretty good and I like the go, single-exectable approach, but I have to say those docs look like more than I want to hassle with. That said, looks like you might be on a good path.
    - buro9 5y ago
      The docs shouldn't be needed by anyone wanting to run a forum. But the whole forum is web API first, and the web site is just a client. The docs are there to say "anything you see this website doing, you can do it through a client you create"... and it doesn't have to be everything, if all you want to do is list publicly visible new conversations on a different website then it's a single API call that you can do from client side JavaScript. But... if you do want to create an entirely new application using the forum as a platform for it, i.e. a full blog system with the forum hidden but driving discussions, or an app where the forum is at the heart of it but the app looks like a cyclists ride database oriented around events and a calendar but with discussions per ride... well knock yourself out, the API makes that pretty easy and there are apps that do both of those things (though natch, they're closed source and the rides one charges over $200 per year per user for it).
- numpad0 5y ago
  As someone grew up with 2ch forum(terrible place) I don’t get why vB gets such a high praise. Too much wasted screen real estate and already overcomplicated.
- dom96 5y ago
  I’ve built a lightweight Discourse clone that you may be interested in checking out. We use it for the Nim programming language forum. https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum
jcelerier 5y ago
Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to the phpbb and vBulletin of yore
- syshum 5y ago
  I still prefer phpbb and vbulletin to slack and discord...
- Oddskar 5y ago
  In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    discoverability answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let alone archived) by search engines
    - Oddskar 5y ago
      Yeah but that isn't the case for Discourse
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    I know of roughly 0 ways discourse is better. Its slower and has vastly less information density
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Security-wise etc. it's probably better than a pile of (I'm guessing) mostly abandoned/assumed 'done' dependencies. But yeah mostly, user-facing-wise, I agree.
  - simias 5y ago
    I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only because of the lack of proper threading. Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
I think Discourse is the first real attempt to bring forums in-line with "modern" UI expectations, which is why it feels like it won. There's probably lots of room to grow here. There's forums out there that allow SMTP-only [1] or SMTP and NNTP reading/posting [2], there's forum skins atop mailing lists like [3], there's distributed forums like Aether or Lemmy like [4, 5]. Unfortunately these are all new/raw. [1]: https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs [2]: https://tade.link https://tade.link [3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/A3JKSJBC53LZPISWGBDXZETQLJYDFA5M/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lis... for example [4]: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/ [5]: https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/
- floren 5y ago
  Your mention of NNTP reading/posting caught my interest, but I wasn't able to find any mention of it on tade.link; is that perhaps a now-deprecated feature, or is it just not documented?
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    It's just not documented. Take a look at https://github.com/epilys/sic/blob/main/tools/nntpserver.py https://github.com/epilys/sic/blob/main/tools/nntpserver.py and another file in the codebase.
- nirvdrum 5y ago
  I really miss NNTP. I appreciate that spam was a huge problem, but it was really nice being able to discover and subscribe to a large number of topics and navigate them all from the same tool. And there was innovation in the client space. Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load channels from each server. As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than something like IRC.
cmroanirgo 5y ago
Not exactly sure what your requirements are but vanilla forums have a clean look, mobile friendly, and have pretty good customization. (Not sure if the latest version supports digest emails though) https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla
- johnisgood 5y ago
  I remember Vanilla Forums! I loved the old look so much. Is it possible to still have that old look (the pink and blue one). It was really minimal!
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    This might not be what you're talking about, but there seems to be a bit of a throw-back theme in the repo. Not the one I remember from when I last looked at Vanilla Forums, but certainly reminiscent of it. https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/master/themes/2011Compatibility/screenshot.png https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/master/themes/2011Co...
    - johnisgood 5y ago
      Yeah, this looks close to it. Thank you. :)
- Aeolun 5y ago
  It doesn’t exactly look active though? Last release was in 2019.
  - NilsIRL 5y ago
    Are we looking at the same page? Because I see multiple releases in 2021: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/releases https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/releases
    - cmroanirgo 5y ago
mthld 5y ago
Do you already know Flarum? If so, did you tried it? https://flarum.org https://flarum.org
- messo 5y ago
  Flarum is a built on PHP / Laravel and is easy to host even on shared hosting providers. It looks and behaves much like Discourse, but less resource intensive in my experience.
majormajor 5y ago
The SBNation article commenting system, introduced like ten years ago now, had a nice take on this. Nested conversations like HN, but with live updating as new comments came in, and tracking of read-vs-unread, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate posts. That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for when viewing later.
julianlam 5y ago
Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla, Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the forum game. The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today. We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software to really make it the best offering out there I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :)
- coupdejarnac 5y ago
  Is there any documentation about creating an integration with nodebb? For example, I have a course on gumroad, and I want to give write access to nodebb based on if a user has a current subscription on gumroad.
  - julianlam 5y ago
    Sure! Custom integrations are our bread and butter (free software kind of doesn't pay the bills otherwise!) Shoot me an email at support@, and I'll give you some pointers. If you want us to do it, we can do that too.
- natdempk 5y ago
  Not trying to be mean, but I hit a bug within 3 seconds of using this software and figured I'd report it here: On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunch I can get stuck in a state where all my history is just the one thread I clicked into. Not totally sure what is going on here, but feels like the type of thing that shows up with manual JS page history management failing to handle rapid events quickly leading to race conditions.
  - julianlam 5y ago
    Yep! That's exactly what you're seeing. Nice detective work! Definitely some papercuts with that system that I'd be happy to spend some time optimizing. I'll probably file a bug and look into it this week. Don't worry about being mean, if we didn't know how to take criticism, we would've gotten out of this game a long time ago. Every bug report (no matter how pedantic) ends up improving the software as a whole, and that ends up with everybody winning
cblconfederate 5y ago
analysis paralysis. PHPbb works fine, it 's only old if you re ageist.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  It’s been over a decade since I ran a forum but I recall phpBB specifically being chock full of security holes, probably more so than even Wordpress. If you didn’t stay on top of keeping it up to date you’d get hit with exploit-wielding bots that would cram your little forum full of spam designed to exploit Google’s ranking algorithms.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    What open source program isn't?
mjrbrennan 5y ago
I'm curious why Discourse feels almost as ephemeral as chat to you?
- Gigachad 5y ago
  It's probably the UI/design of it. Discourse supports infinite scroll and live updates so it kind of looks like an IM thread with a lot more padding.
  - codinghorror 5y ago
    It's not though; all topics are permanent and searchable. So it's the best of both worlds. Have you ever tried searching chatrooms and 100+ channels? Excruciating.
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      I have used search in slack/discord/telegram and found it's super fast and fairly reliable. I can often see references to the same error messages or bring up the topic I'm interested in. Discourse has the advantage that it is indexable by Google which is a big one, but I don't share the frustrations that many here talk about. IM has always felt faster and more responsive than forums ever did. I used to be a huge forum user and I remember posting questions and having to wait at least a day to get to an answer while on IMs I have often found people start to help out immediately and provide their best guess even when they don't have the full answer. While forums felt too formal and if you didn't post a well researched and correct question, your post would immediately be locked/flamed/sunk down.
DantesKite 5y ago
I suspect you’re right. It just doesn’t exist. Discord and Slack both fulfill interesting niches, but everything else is composed of chewing gum and tape. The closest thing is Reddit, but it’s not great because subreddit names can be taken over and it’s hard to topple moderators that refuse to give up power.
- smusamashah 5y ago
  If reddit is open source, can't we use reddit's software as a forum interface? Reddit is a great place for discussion chains which are visible and searchable.
  - saladuh 5y ago
    It's not open source though. I think it used to be a while back but it hasn't for a long time. There's also the fact that it's more difficult to modify software and self host it when it was never built fir that, vs something that was (i.e. reddit vs Discourse
  - riidom 5y ago
    that's lemmy.ml
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xpe 5y ago
Zulip [1] is open source and (IMO) fantastic. [1]: https://github.com/zulip https://github.com/zulip
- spurgu 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're working on creating public chats, readable without logging in, from the browser?
  - anderskaseorg 5y ago
    Yes, the web-public view is being actively worked on: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=label%3A%22area%3A+web+public+streams%22 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=label%3A%22area%3A+w... There’s also a separate zulip-archive project that exports Zulip streams to static HTML: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive
- mdaniel 5y ago
  Zulip is also, last I checked, the only ones who offer completely free, archive-enabled, hosted chat for open source projects ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ ). Mattermost has some kind of "out of the kindness of our heart" setup, but it requires applying for it ( https://docs.mattermost.com/about/license-and-subscription.html#do-you-have-a-program-for-official-non-profits-open-source-projects-and-charities https://docs.mattermost.com/about/license-and-subscription.h... ), and Slack appears to actually retain the archive content, but only makes it available for those who pay
bob1029 5y ago
Development of high-quality forum software is something I have considered undertaking. Hypothetically, If one were to offer something that was hosted and provided a trivial one-click sqlite export facility, would HN generally agree to participate in that sort of ecosystem? A public webhook could be exposed so that enterprising users could build their own replicas or other event-sourced systems on top... Account management would be simple and robust. PBKDF2 scheme over unconstrained passwords with optional 2nd factor of user's choice. All account facts aside from the primary key, email address, hash, salt and iteration count would reside in the public domain, so compliance with regs simply involves allowing the user to remove these items from the system. 1 simple button with a "are you sure" and that's that. The only traces are everything you knowingly placed in the public domain. So, we are just talking about plaintext/markdown here, right? Hackernews comment-tier feature set, but threads stay around forever like reddit? This really doesn't seem like rocket science. Maybe add a tagging/labeling system like GitHub has so that users can quickly go lateral on related topics or comments? I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. Keeping the tools heavily constrained and simple is the key to success here. Twitter is a good example of both. Look at the quality of conversation on HN. Arguably unparalleled as-is. What if these awesome conversation threads just kept going after the initial 24h? Wouldn't that be incredible?
- julianlam 5y ago
  > I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. That's cute. I thought the same back in 2014 when I started building forum software. As it turns out, there's no one "perfect" feature set, and basic feature parity took far longer than I expected it to. But I love reading about new entrants to the forum software scene... Do it! Give me a run for my money :)

by danr4 5y ago

dreyfan 5y ago

I've yet to see a forum software that works as well as vBulletin and the clones of that did in the early to mid 2000s. Everything today is this weird "conversation" view and comments/threads constantly move around based on the whims of a voting audience.

agumonkey 5y ago
I'm extremely surprised by this weird dichotomy. vbulletin era was "low" on tech yet there were a lot of nice chill places.. there was almost nothing special, no ease, few rules, convos were mostly humans and fun. Now there's kilotons of resources (brain and money) trying to make all this go to mars and yet it only creates frailty. Super odd.
- codinghorror 5y ago
  The software didn't change; the people did. Starting in 2014, everyone went online.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    What happened in 2014? I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
    - ShroudedNight 5y ago
      Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness. I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum. But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter. People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
    - krrrh 5y ago
      It seems like a giant confidence game to this day. 80% of adults in the US don’t use Twitter, and of those that do, only a much smaller number are regular users, and an even smaller percentage care to follow brands, which most people rightly see as opt-in advertising. The timeline algorithm makes it even less likely that the pointless post from @reebok is going to reach many people, probably nothing close to the amount of free irl advertising that they gave to Twitter and Facebook.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Yes I’ve poked at twitter a few times but never saw the point. Have been drowned by news of them for almost a decade, right? Self promoters and journalists just desperate for “engagement” to their own detriment.
      - hsn915 5y ago
        What shook me even more was seeing companies hire people for the sole purpose of crafting tweets. They call it "PR".
codinghorror 5y ago
errr. in Discourse conversations are strictly chronological, 100% of the time.
einpoklum 5y ago
So why not continue using it today, until something better comes along?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 5y ago
  It's not "web 3.0" ~
  - account42 5y ago
    Meaning that you can use it with javascrit disabled?
RHSeeger 5y ago
vBulletin is still available, isn't it?
- dreyfan 5y ago
  Yep, works great. Nobody uses it for anything new though.
  - bsder 5y ago
    Presumably mobile compatibility was the issue, no? Everybody nowadays wants to do everything on their phone. Also, didn't vBulletin have a lot of spam and security issues? It's kind of like WordPress in that using it is nice but managing it is hell.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    The last vBullitin site I used was hacked and never came back online. The overhead from running forum software in the age of mass automated abuse is just too great. It's really hard to justify the value of a forum that gets hacked, spammed, costs money, etc when Discord is free and works better for most people.
- AvocadoCake 5y ago
  ProBoards exists and is nice to use, but it's not obvious to me it does anything better for software than Github issues.
- tyteen4a03 5y ago
  From vB4 onwards it has becoming more and more of a hot pile of crap. XenForo is where it's at. Never used IPB but heard they're slipping.
PeterCorless 5y ago
https://xenforo.com/ https://xenforo.com/ — Paradox Interactive uses it for their Stellaris/HOI4/EU4/CK3 communities. edit: e.g., https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universalis-iv.731/ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universal...
- the_pwner224 5y ago
  Xenforo is also used for a lot of vehicle-specific forums. It works very well; modern design / features while still having good usability & UX.
- bob1029 5y ago
  I've set up a few instances of xenforo in the past (2013 ish). Really good kit. I didn't know it was still a thing.
buro9 5y ago
I have something in Go that isn't too bad... it looks like this https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com and powers sites like this http://forum.espruino.com/ http://forum.espruino.com/ Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side though... it was designed as a platform rather than a standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to use.
- mftb 5y ago
  Those home pages look pretty good and I like the go, single-exectable approach, but I have to say those docs look like more than I want to hassle with. That said, looks like you might be on a good path.
  - buro9 5y ago
    The docs shouldn't be needed by anyone wanting to run a forum. But the whole forum is web API first, and the web site is just a client. The docs are there to say "anything you see this website doing, you can do it through a client you create"... and it doesn't have to be everything, if all you want to do is list publicly visible new conversations on a different website then it's a single API call that you can do from client side JavaScript. But... if you do want to create an entirely new application using the forum as a platform for it, i.e. a full blog system with the forum hidden but driving discussions, or an app where the forum is at the heart of it but the app looks like a cyclists ride database oriented around events and a calendar but with discussions per ride... well knock yourself out, the API makes that pretty easy and there are apps that do both of those things (though natch, they're closed source and the rides one charges over $200 per year per user for it).
numpad0 5y ago
As someone grew up with 2ch forum(terrible place) I don’t get why vB gets such a high praise. Too much wasted screen real estate and already overcomplicated.
dom96 5y ago
I’ve built a lightweight Discourse clone that you may be interested in checking out. We use it for the Nim programming language forum. https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum

jcelerier 5y ago

Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to the phpbb and vBulletin of yore

syshum 5y ago
I still prefer phpbb and vbulletin to slack and discord...
Oddskar 5y ago
In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  discoverability answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let alone archived) by search engines
  - Oddskar 5y ago
    Yeah but that isn't the case for Discourse
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  I know of roughly 0 ways discourse is better. Its slower and has vastly less information density
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Security-wise etc. it's probably better than a pile of (I'm guessing) mostly abandoned/assumed 'done' dependencies. But yeah mostly, user-facing-wise, I agree.
- simias 5y ago
  I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only because of the lack of proper threading. Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

I think Discourse is the first real attempt to bring forums in-line with "modern" UI expectations, which is why it feels like it won. There's probably lots of room to grow here. There's forums out there that allow SMTP-only [1] or SMTP and NNTP reading/posting [2], there's forum skins atop mailing lists like [3], there's distributed forums like Aether or Lemmy like [4, 5]. Unfortunately these are all new/raw. [1]: https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs [2]: https://tade.link https://tade.link [3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/A3JKSJBC53LZPISWGBDXZETQLJYDFA5M/ https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lis... for example [4]: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/ [5]: https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/

floren 5y ago
Your mention of NNTP reading/posting caught my interest, but I wasn't able to find any mention of it on tade.link; is that perhaps a now-deprecated feature, or is it just not documented?
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  It's just not documented. Take a look at https://github.com/epilys/sic/blob/main/tools/nntpserver.py https://github.com/epilys/sic/blob/main/tools/nntpserver.py and another file in the codebase.
nirvdrum 5y ago
I really miss NNTP. I appreciate that spam was a huge problem, but it was really nice being able to discover and subscribe to a large number of topics and navigate them all from the same tool. And there was innovation in the client space. Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load channels from each server. As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than something like IRC.

cmroanirgo 5y ago

Not exactly sure what your requirements are but vanilla forums have a clean look, mobile friendly, and have pretty good customization. (Not sure if the latest version supports digest emails though) https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla

johnisgood 5y ago
I remember Vanilla Forums! I loved the old look so much. Is it possible to still have that old look (the pink and blue one). It was really minimal!
- jszymborski 5y ago
  This might not be what you're talking about, but there seems to be a bit of a throw-back theme in the repo. Not the one I remember from when I last looked at Vanilla Forums, but certainly reminiscent of it. https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/master/themes/2011Compatibility/screenshot.png https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/master/themes/2011Co...
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    Yeah, this looks close to it. Thank you. :)
Aeolun 5y ago
It doesn’t exactly look active though? Last release was in 2019.
- NilsIRL 5y ago
  Are we looking at the same page? Because I see multiple releases in 2021: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/releases https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/releases
  - cmroanirgo 5y ago

mthld 5y ago

Do you already know Flarum? If so, did you tried it? https://flarum.org https://flarum.org

messo 5y ago
Flarum is a built on PHP / Laravel and is easy to host even on shared hosting providers. It looks and behaves much like Discourse, but less resource intensive in my experience.

majormajor 5y ago

The SBNation article commenting system, introduced like ten years ago now, had a nice take on this. Nested conversations like HN, but with live updating as new comments came in, and tracking of read-vs-unread, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate posts. That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for when viewing later.

julianlam 5y ago

Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla, Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the forum game. The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today. We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software to really make it the best offering out there I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :)

coupdejarnac 5y ago
Is there any documentation about creating an integration with nodebb? For example, I have a course on gumroad, and I want to give write access to nodebb based on if a user has a current subscription on gumroad.
- julianlam 5y ago
  Sure! Custom integrations are our bread and butter (free software kind of doesn't pay the bills otherwise!) Shoot me an email at support@, and I'll give you some pointers. If you want us to do it, we can do that too.
natdempk 5y ago
Not trying to be mean, but I hit a bug within 3 seconds of using this software and figured I'd report it here: On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunch I can get stuck in a state where all my history is just the one thread I clicked into. Not totally sure what is going on here, but feels like the type of thing that shows up with manual JS page history management failing to handle rapid events quickly leading to race conditions.
- julianlam 5y ago
  Yep! That's exactly what you're seeing. Nice detective work! Definitely some papercuts with that system that I'd be happy to spend some time optimizing. I'll probably file a bug and look into it this week. Don't worry about being mean, if we didn't know how to take criticism, we would've gotten out of this game a long time ago. Every bug report (no matter how pedantic) ends up improving the software as a whole, and that ends up with everybody winning

cblconfederate 5y ago

analysis paralysis. PHPbb works fine, it 's only old if you re ageist.

kitsunesoba 5y ago
It’s been over a decade since I ran a forum but I recall phpBB specifically being chock full of security holes, probably more so than even Wordpress. If you didn’t stay on top of keeping it up to date you’d get hit with exploit-wielding bots that would cram your little forum full of spam designed to exploit Google’s ranking algorithms.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  What open source program isn't?

mjrbrennan 5y ago

I'm curious why Discourse feels almost as ephemeral as chat to you?

Gigachad 5y ago
It's probably the UI/design of it. Discourse supports infinite scroll and live updates so it kind of looks like an IM thread with a lot more padding.
- codinghorror 5y ago
  It's not though; all topics are permanent and searchable. So it's the best of both worlds. Have you ever tried searching chatrooms and 100+ channels? Excruciating.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    I have used search in slack/discord/telegram and found it's super fast and fairly reliable. I can often see references to the same error messages or bring up the topic I'm interested in. Discourse has the advantage that it is indexable by Google which is a big one, but I don't share the frustrations that many here talk about. IM has always felt faster and more responsive than forums ever did. I used to be a huge forum user and I remember posting questions and having to wait at least a day to get to an answer while on IMs I have often found people start to help out immediately and provide their best guess even when they don't have the full answer. While forums felt too formal and if you didn't post a well researched and correct question, your post would immediately be locked/flamed/sunk down.

DantesKite 5y ago

I suspect you’re right. It just doesn’t exist. Discord and Slack both fulfill interesting niches, but everything else is composed of chewing gum and tape. The closest thing is Reddit, but it’s not great because subreddit names can be taken over and it’s hard to topple moderators that refuse to give up power.

smusamashah 5y ago
If reddit is open source, can't we use reddit's software as a forum interface? Reddit is a great place for discussion chains which are visible and searchable.
- saladuh 5y ago
  It's not open source though. I think it used to be a while back but it hasn't for a long time. There's also the fact that it's more difficult to modify software and self host it when it was never built fir that, vs something that was (i.e. reddit vs Discourse
- riidom 5y ago
  that's lemmy.ml

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xpe 5y ago

Zulip [1] is open source and (IMO) fantastic. [1]: https://github.com/zulip https://github.com/zulip

spurgu 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're working on creating public chats, readable without logging in, from the browser?
- anderskaseorg 5y ago
  Yes, the web-public view is being actively worked on: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=label%3A%22area%3A+web+public+streams%22 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=label%3A%22area%3A+w... There’s also a separate zulip-archive project that exports Zulip streams to static HTML: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive
mdaniel 5y ago
Zulip is also, last I checked, the only ones who offer completely free, archive-enabled, hosted chat for open source projects ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ ). Mattermost has some kind of "out of the kindness of our heart" setup, but it requires applying for it ( https://docs.mattermost.com/about/license-and-subscription.html#do-you-have-a-program-for-official-non-profits-open-source-projects-and-charities https://docs.mattermost.com/about/license-and-subscription.h... ), and Slack appears to actually retain the archive content, but only makes it available for those who pay

bob1029 5y ago

Development of high-quality forum software is something I have considered undertaking. Hypothetically, If one were to offer something that was hosted and provided a trivial one-click sqlite export facility, would HN generally agree to participate in that sort of ecosystem? A public webhook could be exposed so that enterprising users could build their own replicas or other event-sourced systems on top... Account management would be simple and robust. PBKDF2 scheme over unconstrained passwords with optional 2nd factor of user's choice. All account facts aside from the primary key, email address, hash, salt and iteration count would reside in the public domain, so compliance with regs simply involves allowing the user to remove these items from the system. 1 simple button with a "are you sure" and that's that. The only traces are everything you knowingly placed in the public domain. So, we are just talking about plaintext/markdown here, right? Hackernews comment-tier feature set, but threads stay around forever like reddit? This really doesn't seem like rocket science. Maybe add a tagging/labeling system like GitHub has so that users can quickly go lateral on related topics or comments? I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. Keeping the tools heavily constrained and simple is the key to success here. Twitter is a good example of both. Look at the quality of conversation on HN. Arguably unparalleled as-is. What if these awesome conversation threads just kept going after the initial 24h? Wouldn't that be incredible?

julianlam 5y ago
> I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. That's cute. I thought the same back in 2014 when I started building forum software. As it turns out, there's no one "perfect" feature set, and basic feature parity took far longer than I expected it to. But I love reading about new entrants to the forum software scene... Do it! Give me a run for my money :)