10 ms·

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were

It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community. I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article). As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests. (I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)

layoric 4y ago
There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- JadoJodo 4y ago
  Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)
  - tabbott 4y ago
    My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.
    - sushid 4y ago
      If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.
      - 3np 4y ago
        Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so. Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.
        Vardiak 4y ago
        I have to disagree. Nowadays, limited liability companies are literally an optimization mechanism for turning profits. Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.
        3np 4y ago
        GP is implying that companies that don't are by definition performing poorly by missing out on the margin.
        3np 4y ago
        In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine. PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/ https://www.phpbb.com/
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want to give up 80 vertical pixels for a Discourse logo. Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.
      - dalmo3 4y ago
        > not a giant scrolling doomswheel Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.
        coffeeling 4y ago
        tl.net, display all.
        folkrav 4y ago
        Hmm, I'm genuinely curious: why? I tend to heavily dislike anything infinite-scrolling...
- getcrunk 4y ago
  Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.
  - julianlam 4y ago
    While I can't speak for Discourse (a sibling comment mentioned it working fine via docker image on 1GB), our standard for NodeBB is it has to install and run on DO's $5 droplet. So far we're hitting that goal.
  - SXX 4y ago
    Discourse can be hosted on $15-20 VPS since it's need docker and fsr more disk space due to using containers.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      I could run phpBB just fine on my $5-10/mo shared hosting. It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they require a lot more resources than shared hosting can provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go along with it.
      - antifa 4y ago
        Most phpBB-like forums will run fine on your $10/year shared MySQL hosts.
        BeetleB 4y ago
        Yes but will Discourse?
- gernb 4y ago
  IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
  - rtpg 4y ago
    I agree about the design, but disagree about thriving-ness. There are many Discourse sites that exist and serve their purposes well. I do daydream about making some simpler forum software though.
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    > I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.
    - oarmstrong 4y ago
      Are you perhaps conflating Discord and Discourse? Discourse is certainly a forum in my eyes.
      - h0l0cube 4y ago
        I was :facepalm:
  - muglug 4y ago
    > I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/ https://users.rust-lang.org/
joe-collins 4y ago
Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server, but they're utter black boxes to the outer world. I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.
- chx 4y ago
  The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.
  - insightcheck 4y ago
    The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games. [0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche. How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...
Melatonic 4y ago
Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful
- atwood22 4y ago
  Reddit is pretty much dead IMO. There seems to be a few substantial posts, if that, per day. Discord is way more active.
  - airtonix 4y ago
    - immibis 4y ago
      the fuck
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?
  - projektfu 4y ago
    Reddit has active communities of people who just repost other subreddits to laugh at, get outraged at, or bully. In theory the bullying and brigading is supposed to be moderated against but weakly moderated niche subreddits can sometimes find themselves under attack. That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.
    - egypturnash 4y ago
Buttons840 4y ago
> I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post? Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  See also: mailing lists.
ddingus 4y ago
I really am missing forums. One area of interest of mine has a good one and it has a solid population. I value it increasingly highly.
Arainach 4y ago
Some solutions apply, but solutions aren't necessarily the problem. In the past, running a forum wasn't that hard - get a server with PHP and a database and install your choice of tools. You could do it yourself or, depending on the size of the community, with a small set of volunteers. That still fundamentally works today. However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.
fivre 4y ago
rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread. i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might help.
- nottorp 4y ago
  Slack has the absolute worst implementation of threads that I've ever seen. There is one item that only tells you that some of the treads you're in have new messages. The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?
RileyJames 4y ago
They were also more than a community. They became massive sources of niche information. Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite) Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off. Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread. Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come. Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.
julianlam 4y ago
Not gone at all! There are a bunch of companies working on the current generation of forums. Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :) e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space. (Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)
- antifa 4y ago
  Not a lot of options where it's a fast, modern language (crystal/nim/rust/etc.) and also not an SPA.
mig39 4y ago
I host a bunch of Discourse sites. You can do it yourself on a 1GB server. The docker install is super easy.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Discourse also offers free hosting for OSS projects.
- SXX 4y ago
  There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there. Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.
  - insane_dreamer 4y ago
    Good to know
derefr 4y ago
> Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident) You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.
- snapdeus 4y ago
  You can't switch users on mobile!
- aendruk 4y ago
  …and I’d be terrified of using that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741
AceJohnny2 4y ago
> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell. I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked. The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses. Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading. In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures. They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more like a natural discussion that way.
- berns 4y ago
  > In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates? Discourse is 100% open source.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. […] In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.
neovive 4y ago
Flarum (https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/) is an interesting option.
sh4rks 4y ago
I would give Discord servers another go. They definitely have that "community" feel, especially for more niche servers.
dirkhe 4y ago
I think https://twist.com/ https://twist.com/ is the best solution between chat and forum. But they have the same pricing slack now starts using and that makes it unusable to keep knowledge.
02020202 4y ago
KhalPanda 4y ago
I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development. The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  The joy is probably the lack of friction.

layoric 4y ago

There is absolutely a self hosting option with Discourse, and in fact they encourage it. [0] Here is their install guide [1] [0] https://github.com/discourse/discourse https://github.com/discourse/discourse [1] https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JadoJodo 4y ago
Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)
- tabbott 4y ago
  My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.
  - sushid 4y ago
    If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.
    - 3np 4y ago
      Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so. Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.
      - Vardiak 4y ago
        I have to disagree. Nowadays, limited liability companies are literally an optimization mechanism for turning profits. Believe me, if consumers were not aware and the law not enforced, there would be (are ?) companies making clothes in slave-like conditions.
        3np 4y ago
        GP is implying that companies that don't are by definition performing poorly by missing out on the margin.
        3np 4y ago
        In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.
systemvoltage 4y ago
I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine. PhpBB is still alive and kicking: https://www.phpbb.com/ https://www.phpbb.com/
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want to give up 80 vertical pixels for a Discourse logo. Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.
    - dalmo3 4y ago
      > not a giant scrolling doomswheel Discourse's scrolling timeline is the absolute best UI feature I've ever used in a forum platform. Nothing else comes even close.
      - coffeeling 4y ago
        tl.net, display all.
      - folkrav 4y ago
        Hmm, I'm genuinely curious: why? I tend to heavily dislike anything infinite-scrolling...
getcrunk 4y ago
Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.
- julianlam 4y ago
  While I can't speak for Discourse (a sibling comment mentioned it working fine via docker image on 1GB), our standard for NodeBB is it has to install and run on DO's $5 droplet. So far we're hitting that goal.
- SXX 4y ago
  Discourse can be hosted on $15-20 VPS since it's need docker and fsr more disk space due to using containers.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    I could run phpBB just fine on my $5-10/mo shared hosting. It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they require a lot more resources than shared hosting can provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go along with it.
    - antifa 4y ago
      Most phpBB-like forums will run fine on your $10/year shared MySQL hosts.
      - BeetleB 4y ago
        Yes but will Discourse?
gernb 4y ago
IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse. On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
- rtpg 4y ago
  I agree about the design, but disagree about thriving-ness. There are many Discourse sites that exist and serve their purposes well. I do daydream about making some simpler forum software though.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  > I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.
  - oarmstrong 4y ago
    Are you perhaps conflating Discord and Discourse? Discourse is certainly a forum in my eyes.
    - h0l0cube 4y ago
      I was :facepalm:
- muglug 4y ago
  > I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced I can fix that! Click here: https://users.rust-lang.org/ https://users.rust-lang.org/

joe-collins 4y ago

Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server, but they're utter black boxes to the outer world. I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.

chx 4y ago
The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games. [0] https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki https://papersplease.fandom.com/wiki/Papers_Please_Wiki
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. Yeah, what's up with that? I mean, it's the perfect solution for wikipedia deletionism: one wiki for each niche. How could they screw it up so badly? Every time I go there it's a mess of autoplaying videos, annoying banners, even ads...

Melatonic 4y ago

Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful

atwood22 4y ago
Reddit is pretty much dead IMO. There seems to be a few substantial posts, if that, per day. Discord is way more active.
- airtonix 4y ago
  - immibis 4y ago
    the fuck
nyanpasu64 4y ago
In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?
- projektfu 4y ago
  Reddit has active communities of people who just repost other subreddits to laugh at, get outraged at, or bully. In theory the bullying and brigading is supposed to be moderated against but weakly moderated niche subreddits can sometimes find themselves under attack. That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.
  - egypturnash 4y ago

Buttons840 4y ago

> I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post? Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.

nerdponx 4y ago
See also: mailing lists.

ddingus 4y ago

I really am missing forums. One area of interest of mine has a good one and it has a solid population. I value it increasingly highly.

Arainach 4y ago

Some solutions apply, but solutions aren't necessarily the problem. In the past, running a forum wasn't that hard - get a server with PHP and a database and install your choice of tools. You could do it yourself or, depending on the size of the community, with a small set of volunteers. That still fundamentally works today. However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.

fivre 4y ago

rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread. i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.

lazyasciiart 4y ago
I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might help.
nottorp 4y ago
Slack has the absolute worst implementation of threads that I've ever seen. There is one item that only tells you that some of the treads you're in have new messages. The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?

RileyJames 4y ago

They were also more than a community. They became massive sources of niche information. Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite) Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off. Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread. Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come. Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.

julianlam 4y ago

Not gone at all! There are a bunch of companies working on the current generation of forums. Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :) e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space. (Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)

antifa 4y ago
Not a lot of options where it's a fast, modern language (crystal/nim/rust/etc.) and also not an SPA.

mig39 4y ago

I host a bunch of Discourse sites. You can do it yourself on a 1GB server. The docker install is super easy.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Discourse also offers free hosting for OSS projects.

SXX 4y ago
There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there. Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.
- insane_dreamer 4y ago
  Good to know

derefr 4y ago

> Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident) You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.

snapdeus 4y ago
You can't switch users on mobile!
aendruk 4y ago
…and I’d be terrified of using that. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32172741

AceJohnny2 4y ago

> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell. I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked. The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses. Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading. In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?

SoftTalker 4y ago
Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures. They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more like a natural discussion that way.
berns 4y ago
> In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates? Discourse is 100% open source.
masklinn 4y ago
> The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. […] In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.

neovive 4y ago

Flarum (https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/) is an interesting option.

sh4rks 4y ago

I would give Discord servers another go. They definitely have that "community" feel, especially for more niche servers.

dirkhe 4y ago

I think https://twist.com/ https://twist.com/ is the best solution between chat and forum. But they have the same pricing slack now starts using and that makes it unusable to keep knowledge.

02020202 4y ago

KhalPanda 4y ago

I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development. The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.

EamonnMR 4y ago
The joy is probably the lack of friction.