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Forum software of phpBB's era got so many things right that we get wrong today. I'm glad it's still chugging along. It's valuable software, even if that value i

Forum software of phpBB's era got so many things right that we get wrong today. I'm glad it's still chugging along. It's valuable software, even if that value is contained to small islands outside of the continents that are the mega-platforms of social media.

user3939382 4y ago
We didn’t know at the time we were in a golden age of federation that would soon be evaporating. Discoverability may have been less than say a subreddit, but the mods were in practically 100% control of the rules.
bluedino 4y ago
One bad thing about old forum threads is a lot of the images are lost. Disk space and bandwidth were still expensive back then. The free image hosts mostly disappeared or started charging (so many forums have dead photobucket links).
- Gigachad 4y ago
  They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.
  - kijin 4y ago
    Which really didn't matter back then. People just deleted the spam, recovered from backup, patched whatever flaw they found, and changed passwords. It wasn't the end of the world.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.
      - mattl 4y ago
        Janny?
        scrlk 4y ago
        Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team. Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.
        mattl 4y ago
        Ah, makes sense.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Spam did matter when it didnt stop. No one wanted to engage in a full time job of deleting bullshit. This is one of the reasons forums disappeared and people went to larger sites that tended to have much larger moderation staff
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Same thing is going to happen again once imgur shuts down. While the pictures that were actually hosted on the forum itself are usually fine.
  - z57 4y ago
    That will be a day of days. imgur shutting down will be like someone shaking your internet Etch-A-Sketch. The internet post imgur will have a completely different vibe.
    - Medox 4y ago
      Sounds like a job for archive.org
      - esskay 4y ago
        That doesn't solve the issue of the millions of embeds and links though.
        account42 4y ago
        It's kind of sad that browsers still have no concept of the passage of time (except to intentionally break things for security). One of the many things that a browser focused on being a browser for hyperlinked documents could do better than our current app delivery platforms calling themselves browsers.
        BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Why not ? (Besides that of course it would be probably easier for the Archive to deal with multimedia inside the same website.)
        esskay 4y ago
        What do you mean why not? If a forum embeds an image from imgur and imgur ceases to exist the image stops working. It doesn't matter if archive.org has a copy, you wont be able to see it without manually going to archive.org to find every image by its former embed url (which likley isnt archived as thats a different url to the one you see on their site).
timeon 4y ago
Not sure how it was in last decade but there were two things I remember that I didn't like about phpBB forums: - lack of threads - signature noise
POPOSYS 4y ago
But people using forums also got so many things wrong. One thing that really went wrong: people using forums as issue trackers. Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. Instead of using an issue tracker, they post more and more messages to the one forum topic dedicated to $thing. Some hardware related forums still do that. Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Also the extremely annoying UIs - as an example look at the minimal navigation / pagination buttons in many forums. Well, OK, that started to change slowly, but still we have horrible UIs everywhere. Annoyances like most space on a forum page still wasted for unimportant side information do exist - some designs are so bad that the most important information has the smallest font size. But while the good old slick and dirty PHP forums still delivered with all that warts, mostly because these people still knew how to program fast software, then came the ruby programmers and brought us a vision of forum software that should get a premium lifetime award for coding horrors. JS heavy frontend with grotesque front-end anti-patterns and a monstrous bloated backend that breaks when your forum actually has some attention. The time of "internet software as a satirical art form" has not stopped until today. So hopefully the old-school PHP devs can easily iron out the annoyances of the past and still deliver internet software that is fast and usable. Happy release party, PhpBB!
- sourcecodeplz 4y ago
  > Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.
- antifa 4y ago
  > Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. That's basically the default experience of discord.

user3939382 4y ago

We didn’t know at the time we were in a golden age of federation that would soon be evaporating. Discoverability may have been less than say a subreddit, but the mods were in practically 100% control of the rules.

bluedino 4y ago

One bad thing about old forum threads is a lot of the images are lost. Disk space and bandwidth were still expensive back then. The free image hosts mostly disappeared or started charging (so many forums have dead photobucket links).

Gigachad 4y ago
They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.
- kijin 4y ago
  Which really didn't matter back then. People just deleted the spam, recovered from backup, patched whatever flaw they found, and changed passwords. It wasn't the end of the world.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.
    - mattl 4y ago
      Janny?
      - scrlk 4y ago
        Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team. Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.
        mattl 4y ago
        Ah, makes sense.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Spam did matter when it didnt stop. No one wanted to engage in a full time job of deleting bullshit. This is one of the reasons forums disappeared and people went to larger sites that tended to have much larger moderation staff
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Same thing is going to happen again once imgur shuts down. While the pictures that were actually hosted on the forum itself are usually fine.
- z57 4y ago
  That will be a day of days. imgur shutting down will be like someone shaking your internet Etch-A-Sketch. The internet post imgur will have a completely different vibe.
  - Medox 4y ago
    Sounds like a job for archive.org
    - esskay 4y ago
      That doesn't solve the issue of the millions of embeds and links though.
      - account42 4y ago
        It's kind of sad that browsers still have no concept of the passage of time (except to intentionally break things for security). One of the many things that a browser focused on being a browser for hyperlinked documents could do better than our current app delivery platforms calling themselves browsers.
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Why not ? (Besides that of course it would be probably easier for the Archive to deal with multimedia inside the same website.)
        esskay 4y ago
        What do you mean why not? If a forum embeds an image from imgur and imgur ceases to exist the image stops working. It doesn't matter if archive.org has a copy, you wont be able to see it without manually going to archive.org to find every image by its former embed url (which likley isnt archived as thats a different url to the one you see on their site).

timeon 4y ago

Not sure how it was in last decade but there were two things I remember that I didn't like about phpBB forums: - lack of threads - signature noise

POPOSYS 4y ago

But people using forums also got so many things wrong. One thing that really went wrong: people using forums as issue trackers. Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. Instead of using an issue tracker, they post more and more messages to the one forum topic dedicated to $thing. Some hardware related forums still do that. Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Also the extremely annoying UIs - as an example look at the minimal navigation / pagination buttons in many forums. Well, OK, that started to change slowly, but still we have horrible UIs everywhere. Annoyances like most space on a forum page still wasted for unimportant side information do exist - some designs are so bad that the most important information has the smallest font size. But while the good old slick and dirty PHP forums still delivered with all that warts, mostly because these people still knew how to program fast software, then came the ruby programmers and brought us a vision of forum software that should get a premium lifetime award for coding horrors. JS heavy frontend with grotesque front-end anti-patterns and a monstrous bloated backend that breaks when your forum actually has some attention. The time of "internet software as a satirical art form" has not stopped until today. So hopefully the old-school PHP devs can easily iron out the annoyances of the past and still deliver internet software that is fast and usable. Happy release party, PhpBB!

sourcecodeplz 4y ago
> Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find. Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.
antifa 4y ago
> Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. That's basically the default experience of discord.