18 ms·

Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

373 points by partly_cloudy 4y ago

pleb_nz 4y ago
Apart from the poor performance which surprised me considering I would expect it to be light, this is awesome and I for one sure miss an internet like this. It's so corporate now...
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  hey i'd love to know more if you wouldn't mind helping! where exactly in the world are you located and in what ways are you seeing poor performance?
borowiak 4y ago
Looks great! One element that is missing for those nostalgia vibes that was super common at the time is a visitors counter.
Lolaccount 4y ago
My god, that takes me back to the good old days. Love it. Well done.
partly_cloudy 4y ago
built in remix.run with a Python backend, basementcommunity is a nod to early forums from the early 2000s like something awful and fark, focusing on manual moderation and discussions happen in chronological order
- deleted 4y ago
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- bartread 4y ago
  I like it. Never noticed a forum with a wall of shame before even though I lurked on a few old skool car forums in the mid-2000s. I do remember a heck of a scrap occurring sometime 2005/6 between 300zx.co.uk and a couple of the other forums of the time. Loads of people banned, even longtime users, site admins, committee members. It was a mess.
  - floren 4y ago
    The "wall of shame" on this site comes pretty directly from the Something Awful forums Leper's Colony: https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php
    - partly_cloudy 4y ago
      yup
- quadrature 4y ago
  I've been playing around with remix and i come from a python backend. would love to know more about how you mix these two ?. Is the backend essentially just a rest API with a handoff to remix for rendering ?.
  - partly_cloudy 4y ago
    yep the Python backend is a standalone rest API and the FE is running on a completely separate server
- jay-barronville 4y ago
  Why Remix with a Python backend? Did you need Python for anything specific? Is there some specific need that a pure Remix backend couldn’t give you? Just curious.
  - partly_cloudy 4y ago
    actually at the time i wrote the API, i was still considering how the FE was going to be written, so because i never used remix until this point, i didn't realize they offered an all-in-one solution. honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust
    - Kiro 4y ago
      So why even use Remix? Maybe I misunderstand what it is.
      - Ralfp 4y ago
        With Remix, you run two two servers: - Remix server - API server When user visits your page, their first HTTP request hits the Remix, which pulls data from API server and renders initial HTTP response from your React.js UI. It then sends this response to the client, so you see full site load at one time, even with JavaScript off. If you have JavaScript enabled, the client version of the React.js UI will load and replace the HTML generated on server, making things interactive. This UI will hit Remix API server for Remix features, but you can still hit your API server from individual components if you need.
- ricopags 4y ago
  any plans to share the code? I've been thinking of rebooting a crappy club for jerks and this looks like it could be a great jumping off point if you'd be willing to share
theknocker 4y ago
[dead]
nonethewiser 4y ago
I love it. I was recently nostalgic about phpbb forums. Thought it would be cool to build a site like that. How is the SEO? Seems like poor SEO (never mind Reddit) was one of the reasons they really fell off the map.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  remix has some good built-in APIs for creating SEO-performant pages. everything is server-side rendered for starters, but it's also easy to add meta tags for each page in your react component routes
carabiner 4y ago
You can still go to these. Genmay.com is still on life support.
- wolrah 4y ago
  As is Something Awful, which OP lists as inspiration. The forums are apparently still self sustaining financially, but I don't believe the user count has moved significantly for around a decade. It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
  - carabiner 4y ago
    The main thing is the chronological ordering and lack of karma ordering leads to more freewheeling, breezy conversations. People aren't ego posting as much and are more liberal with speaking their minds, even if their views are unpopular. There are less flamewars, though you also miss out on some deeper discussions. This is also why I like Blind so much, where anonymity has caused it to be the best source of advice on tech careers by a mile. Blunt, harsh advice there has been life-changing.
    - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      Additionally, topics being sorted by "what post received a comment most recently" meant that high-quality threads stayed near the top for a long time, leading to much better discoverability. When I want to learn a lot about some obscure hobby, a dedicated forum is an extremely good place to go. Read the top 5-10 threads in most of the categories, and you've got a fantastic jumping off point.
      - nonethewiser 4y ago
        This is a major difference. Reddit, Hackernews, and others are more "24 hour news cycle". Built to churn out new and bury old.
t09i209ba893 4y ago
Cool, is source available? I didn't see it.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  not yet, but definitely in the future!
  - aetherspawn 4y ago
    We would love to see the source code for this also. Would be very nostalgic to self-host an instance for personal use.
    - thenipper 4y ago
      Same! It has a nice vibe that'd be great for like keeping in touch with friends
cecida 4y ago
Early 2000s message boards were so much fun. vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up. Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
- scrlk 4y ago
  > hilariously awful moderation > (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST) > Thread locked: use the search function next time followed by... > (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST) > Thread locked: don't necropost :^)
- edgyquant 4y ago
  >hilariously awful moderation I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war
  - reb 4y ago
    Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.
    - tfgg 4y ago
      Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse. Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.
  - mostlysimilar 4y ago
    I'm always surprised by this when these types of threads come up on HN. A lot of people seem to remember these forums being moderated poorly, or being run by egomaniacs. My experience is the opposite. The internet forums I spent any time on were generally run by passionate people who cared about the community and donated their time to help keep them running smoothly. I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.
1970-01-01 4y ago
AOL Server is still kickin https://sourceforge.net/projects/aolserver/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/aolserver/
- deleted 4y ago
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glonq 4y ago
After reddit implodes, I vote that we bring back forums and/or BBS's
- ddejohn 4y ago
  All for -- as long as we can use markdown instead of BBCode. I hate BBCode.
- EarlKing 4y ago
  Why wait? AWS and DigitalOcean are dirt cheap. Go set something up and have fun. A number of communities have already forked from Reddit and seem to be doing just fine. As long as you have something interesting to talk about then people will come.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- codazoda 4y ago
  I built an “ssh shell” with this in mind. It’s actually just a hello world app that prompts for your name, because it turns out that’s all you need. Someday I may build a modern BBS via ssh. Yes, I’m aware you can use telnet, but I thought SSH felt more modern. https://github.com/codazoda/goshell https://github.com/codazoda/goshell
- zirgs 4y ago
  I already moved from reddit to neogaf. It's nice - nobody bans you for saying that GTA should not be censored. And discussions about politics are banned.
- deleted 4y ago
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fwungy 4y ago
Nice Gemini-esque type feel.
mtlynch 4y ago
Congrats this looks really cool! As someone who grew up in the heyday of these message boards, I appreciate the throwback. I also like the sports board title (though, technically, it should be "we like sportz").
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  dang good call!! updated!!!
  - mtlynch 4y ago
    That's kablamo!
Klonoar 4y ago
Can I just say that you've done a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of old school forums without going overboard into old school UI/UX? The spacing, font choices and just general layout feel modern enough without being overbearing. It's very pleasant to browse.
- eterm 4y ago
  It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back. Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way. It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.
  - partly_cloudy 4y ago
    yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.
  - Klonoar 4y ago
    I'm discussing UI/UX, not the stack. The back button is... something else here.
    - 100721 4y ago
      I think the back button fits perfectly into the UI/UX. It is, quite literally, part of the UI. We don't have much control over the UI portion, but it is firmly in the realm of UX.
      - Klonoar 4y ago
        UX, maybe. UI? No, not even remotely in the conversation. The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.
paulpauper 4y ago
Hacker News is like a late '90s forum in terms of minimalism, but it has a sick backend. same for Wikipedia and craigslist. That is usually how it is: simple frontend, technical backend
- xwdv 4y ago
  The backend is not that sick. Just a simple program running on some PC under someone’s desk somewhere.
Felger 4y ago
The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO. The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo. Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)
- vinrob92 4y ago
  Another one is https://www.guitariste.com/forums/ https://www.guitariste.com/forums/ since 2000!
- deleted 4y ago
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- nonethewiser 4y ago
  I love the UI but making each comment an HTML table is making me very uncomfortable.
  - krapp 4y ago
    You may not want to view source on HN then.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      wow did not expect that! interesting
      - beardog 4y ago
        You can export photos as html tables from GIMP for some reason too, example: https://chaoswebs.net/pepe/ https://chaoswebs.net/pepe/
blueridge 4y ago
I see the Wall of Shame already has a solid foundation.
rqtwteye 4y ago
People think I am insane but I often think forums would be way better than Slack or Teams for company collaboration.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Forums are so much better for threaded conversations than anything else it’s amazing. All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.
  - ddejohn 4y ago
    I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion. Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft. I guess I'm conflating a few different things here. I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
    - vouaobrasil 4y ago
      Check out DPreview.com. They have threaded view done right. It's much better than this forum for threads because you can see a hierarchical index of all posts, whereas popular threads here only have the first thread easily visible if it's really long and by the time the discussion gets into past depth 3 it's usually quite boring here.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Forums work best when there’s a community that curates things into threads and sub forums when necessary. If they’re basically used as an infinitely long chat record they’re not as strong (though the archiving is inherently better there).
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
Baen's Bar[0] (the forum for Baen publishing) is very early internet as well. [0] https://baensbar.net/ https://baensbar.net/ but you'll have to register to see anything good
- deleted 4y ago
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quickthrower2 4y ago
Legendary: https://basementcommunity.com/offenses https://basementcommunity.com/offenses
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blueridge 4y ago
Anyone play World of Warcraft back in the day? Remember Elitist Jerks, their forum? Great place for solid gameplay discussion. And the general social threads in the Benefactors Bar were excellent. They had strict writing rules and moderators enforced the use of good grammar and complete sentences. https://web.archive.org/web/20080913011707/http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php https://web.archive.org/web/20080913011707/http://elitistjer... https://web.archive.org/web/20080921165026/http://elitistjerks.com/f34/t32399-warning_ivriniel_grammar/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080921165026/http://elitistjer... "Please don't use chatroom abbreviations like "ofc". Mostly a good post, so only a warning - just try to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Thanks. Also, for future reference: the word "I" should be capitalized." Gold.
- iafiaf 4y ago
  Didn't think I'd see EJ mentioned here. I distinctly recall planning and reading raiding strategies in there fur hours. I think there largest Onyxia thread was started by me. Glorious times.
  - blueridge 4y ago
    Glorious indeed. Mal'Ganis represent!
- deleted 4y ago
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  - deleted 4y ago
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- chrisoconnell 4y ago
  The GM of Elitist Jerks was Ion Hazzikostas, now Game Director of World of Warcraft.
spiritplumber 4y ago
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/turbo-necro-book-of-revelation-rpg.5463/page-2 https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/turbo-necro-book-of-... I am to blame for a 20-year necropost.
- deleted 4y ago
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Aeolun 4y ago
This is way too flat to be a 2000s era forum. But it looks nice. I’m not sure about thread display on mobile though. The table format seems like it takes way too much space for the post count display. Also, navigating back somehow keeps the existing page after swiping, and then janks back to the previous page after 200ms or so. Not sure what causes that.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  > This is way too flat to be a 2000s era forum. I guess that makes it "2000s-inspired". I think it's fine if the visual style of the 2000s eras isn't retained, as long as the character is the same (e.g. linear threads, and threads that are ranked by last reply instead of upvotes).
- deleted 4y ago
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lvxferre 4y ago
The interface is amazing. Clean, it doesn't leave huge amounts of empty space that scream "this was made for phone users, everyone else might fuck off", and the subforums already hint "we want to gather political dissidents". It feels like the 00s forums without looking like one, it's the best of both worlds. I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three different errors (capital letters required, special characters required, min length required). However, I feel like a user hitting this issue accidentally would've given up after the third try. Perhaps it could be worth to check for multiple errors at once, and output them all to the user; e.g. "The password must mix case, and contain special characters, and have a minimum length of 8". Just an idea/feedback, mind you.
- account42 4y ago
  > special characters required This one is super annoying. A long password without special characters is not any less secure than a short password with one special character added because it was required. Better than arbitrary requirements like this would be to estimate the entropy and then just prevent low-entropy passwords (or only tell the user - not everyone needs the same level of security for everything).
andy_andy_andy 4y ago
_incredible_ how quickly hacker news visitors start posting slurs
- Arrath 4y ago
  Oh you saw that thread by poster 'aaaaa' also? I registered just to tell them to fuck off but by the time I did the thread had been deleted. Way to go moderation!
  - andy_andy_andy 4y ago
    i've seen about half a dozen in the past 2 hours
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Yeesh.
      - partly_cloudy 4y ago
        so annoying -_-
  - idiocrat 4y ago
    It seems the forum is too generic, has no specialization, and has no seeded curated content. So if some CRM company has their demo/demo portal, I also post aaaaaaaaaa to check the basic functionality, not hoping this will ever take off. I also post very long aaaaaaa....aaaaaaa to see how the interface deals with overflow. Anyway whatever I post will be refreshed next day.
    - partly_cloudy 4y ago
      he had a racist ass username so i changed it
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Yeah it wasn't the guy's username at the time that was the issue, it was the content of the thread he created but I wasn't going to repeat it in polite company here.
partyguy 4y ago
That looks awesome! I do miss the "old" web2.0 with it's forums, message boards and the characistic designs. I always appreciate any throwback/retro web projects! Great work!
Vapormac 4y ago
The (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) is chef's kiss
- sithadmin 4y ago
  :10bux:
- idiocrat 4y ago
  This turned me off. The reason given for the ban that the user has used Dostoevsky's book title as his handle name.
  - jszymborski 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure the username was changed to IDIOT so that the offensive name would no longer be shown. There are far worse usernames than idiot on there.
  - partly_cloudy 4y ago
    yeah he just had some stupid racist username
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Aeolun 4y ago
> Registrations are currently turned off. Wut? It would have been nice to know this before I spent effort filling out all information and generating a password.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  sorry man. this guy won't leave the site alone and keeps posting really racist shit despite me continuing to block his IP addresses over and over.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Got it. I found out after reading the rest of the thread. Hope you can figure out the culprit, or he’ll just forget about it after a day. May be worth showing that message on the registration page right from the start if/when registrations are turned off.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      or just hand out invites to people on hn who have an email listed.
      - partly_cloudy 4y ago
        i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again
        aliqot 4y ago
        Walk in, 'user is on probation for this post'. Just like home :) Good luck with it
        Aeolun 4y ago
        Even if it looks like the 2000’s it’s clearly the 20s, where you cannot even post your site on a civilized forum without attracting the trolls… Anyway, I made a pending account now :)
Thorentis 4y ago
I had this random idea where I could start a new forum like this, but make it appear popular by seeding it with hundreds of users who are just ChatGPT. Wouldn't be surprised if this is already being done by some sites. Dead Internet Theory is real.
- userbinator 4y ago
  I actually came across sites like that before, although the coherency of the posts were definitely far worse than ChatGPT as that was before its invention. Looked more like the typical SEO spam than anything else.
andreygrehov 4y ago
https://bitcointalk.org/ https://bitcointalk.org/ is still running SMF (created in 2006) and looks pretty old school.
throwaway81523 4y ago
It loads a huge chunk of obfuscated javascript buildshared something something. I thought that was more recent than early 2000s. Also it loads fonts from google. It all seems way too modern. The main forum I remember using in that era was Webcrossing, which was more like Hacker News in being mostly text, though (my preference) not threaded. Usenet was also still going strong back then. Added: it is quite hard to use with lynx. I think it is best to not depend on much layout from the browser. I used WebX with lynx all the time and it was fine. Not saying this is a bad forum in general terms, but I think if it is aiming for retro appeal, it doesn't go far enough.
- deleted 4y ago
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- pbj1968 4y ago
  Lynx?!? Sir, I mean no disrespect, but it may be time to move away from your 1996 dumb terminal.
  - throwaway81523 4y ago
    Early 2000s forums should work fine with 1996 terminals.
  - account42 4y ago
    Lynx does require ANSI escape codes so someone using it is quite clearly not using a TERM=dumb terminal.
BFLpL0QNek 4y ago
Nice design. I miss the 2000s forums. They were a great source of information that was easy to read, search and for search engines to index. As the posts where often by enthusiasts they were a treasure trove, especially the automotive forums for repair information. The closest we have now is Reddit but doesn’t feel the same and the UX certainly isn’t as good even comparing to 2000s hobbyists installing vanilla Vbulletin and tweaking colours and a few plugins. A lot of the forums I visited that died, died because success made hosting to expensive as the only option was vertical scaling the database and hard to moneytorise, then things like private Facebook groups took away the various cliques. I often wondered if I could create a horizontal scalable forum to make hosting costs trivial. Topics are a natural partition key and old posts are heavily cacheable with only recent posts needing lower cache ttls. I think the deployment complexity would be too much for hobbyist though.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  They seem to make a comeback of sorts. I know a few podcasts at least that have gathered their community in "old school" web forums. Some of them literally use the old phpBB, but some use much more modern and mature software, that is a pleasure to use. They all however still adhere to the linear (non-tree) thread model. You can answer to individual posts and they are then linked together, but all posts still appear in chronological order under the thread. It really works, and feels much more like a community, like it did in the old days. There are also some really long-lived threads, things don't age out quickly as they do on reddit and HN. Threads are ranked by recent activity, not by upvotes. I don't know why they make a comeback. Maybe a combination of the realization that the old forums just worked better for community building, and Facebook (which I think was indeed a large driver of the "forum death" of the 2010s) fading.
  - wyclif 4y ago
    There are still a lot of these old phpBB style forums in the wild, and some of them are still going strong. I have in mind TDPRI, Steve Hoffman, and Whiteblaze: https://www.tdpri.com/ https://www.tdpri.com/ https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/ https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/ https://whiteblaze.net/ https://whiteblaze.net/
Ocha 4y ago
There are real forums from early 2000 running on early 2000 code. Check out https://forum.ge/ https://forum.ge/
- krapp 4y ago
  Matt's Script Archive is still around[0]. There are even some WWWBoards still in the wild too. http://www.scriptarchive.com/ http://www.scriptarchive.com/
edwinyzh 4y ago
Well done! The forum feels very nice to the eyes!
chrisco255 4y ago
Great job! Also love the little details like the web ring animated .gif at the bottom that points to a live, working web ring on Neocities.
matt3210 4y ago
Beautiful!
RankingMember 4y ago
Hmm, I'm not receiving an activation/confirmation email and can't post- do I need to wait to be admitted or is there something I'm doing wrong? Edit: Haha nice old school Lonely Island reference in the Sports sub-forum subtitle
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  yep you need to be manually approved for now! you should be good to post now but let me know if you're still locked out
  - deleted 4y ago
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atdixon 4y ago
Beautiful! Would you ever consider building/porting this to nostr? https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/
slotrans 4y ago
I love how fast it is. I used to hang out on a lot of phpBB and vBulletin forums, and one thing that puzzles me in retrospect is why their performance was so terrible. I can certainly understand how the first versions would be not so great, but the authors released many new versions over the years that tweaked the styling and added a few features but the performance was always awful. Seems like if the authors had put their minds to it those forums could have been super fast, which everyone would have loved because slow forums translated into bigger hosting costs...
- Aloha 4y ago
  Most of them were on overloaded shared hosting boxes. I know this because I worked for hosting providers in that era.
  - slotrans 4y ago
    Oh for sure. But doesn't that increase the returns to making the code more efficient? I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. My memory tells me it would usually be in the 30-something range, maybe 50-something. It could have been 1!
    - anthonyhn 4y ago
      >I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. It might have been Simple Machine Forum (SMF). The footer has the number of queries and number of seconds it took to generate the page (in my case, their community forum index page used 9 queries and took ~0.3 seconds to generate). https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer
  - RajT88 4y ago
    Yep. That's how it went with my friends and I hosting phpBB for many years on a linux-based hosting provider. When I spun up YAF.Net on an AWS IIS server, with a same-machine backend of SQLEXPRESS, it ran like a champ for years with hardly a blip. 16 bucks a month. It wasn't ever really snappy, per se, but at least it was consistent and didn't bog down.
exodust 4y ago
Why talk in past tense about forums? Still plenty of active forums. These days they are topic-specific, product specific. Some I've visited recently: https://fuckcombustion.com/ https://fuckcombustion.com/ https://forums.unrealengine.com/ https://forums.unrealengine.com/ https://forum.1010music.com https://forum.1010music.com Every game on Steam has its own "forum"... https://steamcommunity.com/app/1167630/discussions/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1167630/discussions/ This Australian forum is one of the few big ones with general topics and a nice readable design that hasn't changed in decades. Certain sub forums like news get unlocked once you're proven not a troll. https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ https://gearspace.com/board/ https://gearspace.com/board/ Too many to list! Even Roger Deakins (cinematographer) has his own forum: https://www.rogerdeakins.com/forums/ https://www.rogerdeakins.com/forums/
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Yeah I feel like there’s a corollary to Eternal September where while the common areas of the Internet might be flooded with n00bs, the places that are less than user-friendly may remain intact to the curmudgeonly and the niche. Old school forums are alive in general, even if in specifics many communities are slowly dwindling, completely unmonetizeable, or if they’re dwarfed by Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comment sections, etc.
- userbinator 4y ago
  These days they are topic-specific, product specific Almost all automotive forums fall in that category... here's a tiny sample of what's out there: https://www.v8buick.com/index.php https://www.v8buick.com/index.php https://www.newcaprice.com/forum/ https://www.newcaprice.com/forum/ https://www.crownvic.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=cfrm https://www.crownvic.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=cfrm https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/ https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/
- pell 4y ago
  While a lot of forums still exist, I think the amount of active communities has definitely declined. I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them died because people eventually moved to other platforms. The way I see it, what made a forum great was the community, a constant stream of active posts and engagement. To me they were a hangout spot, a venue of entertainment more than anything else. These hangout spots seemed to have shifted to social media platforms for a lot of people. Another issue seems to have been a decision by Google to devalue forum posts. Those used to be very common search results 5-10 years ago. It's pretty rare these days.
flykespice 4y ago
back when sites were efficient on user-experience and perfomance
teolandon 4y ago
I haven't been this excited to jump in and post in a community in a while. There's just something so inviting in commenting on a thread knowing that your post will be there, in order, and won't be lost in the noise even if you didn't show up early. I had a whole post written out on a thread, but apparently I need to wait for approval. Bit of a bummer but we'll see how long that takes. Good luck!
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  hey sorry about that - you should be approved now and i went ahead and added a message for un-approved users so they'll know before they make a post
- euoia 4y ago
  Same. It would have been nice to know that I need approval before writing out my post.
  - partly_cloudy 4y ago
    hey sorry about that - you should be approved now and i went ahead and added a message for un-approved users so they'll know before they make a post
  - account42 4y ago
    Requiring approval for the first couple of posts from new users is one of the most sensible anti-spam policies. I'd much rather see more of that than the current forced AI training labor favored by most sites.
braingenious 4y ago
I see that there’s an “SA refugee” thread… is this meant to be another one of those or is that just a joke? Historically SA spinoffs haven’t turned out to be the best communities. edit: Horse Porn Junction motwithstanding, of course
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  At the moment, SomethingAwful has probably the worst moderation in the existence of the site. It's a strictly controlled echo chamber that thousands of people have left. It might be legit.
  - braingenious 4y ago
    As a super old-timer, that sounds a bit hyperbolic. I guess if you don’t remember aussie jim or Pele then yeah I could see not liking the mods, especially if you’re like, a D&D poster. Then again, D&D posters have perpetually lived in the worst period of moderation in human history since the migration off UBB.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ricopags 4y ago
  might want to delete the comment, or at least the edit. you should really know better
  - braingenious 4y ago
    ??? Did you not have an account on HPJ?
    - ricopags 4y ago
      did I or do I?
      - 4y ago
salamwaddah 4y ago
remove mobile responsiveness
julianlam 4y ago
As the maintainer of a self-proclaimed "modern" forum software, I always get really excited when new board software comes out. You've probably discovered that building forum software is a lot more complicated than it looks. Those early boards really had a lot more going on under the hood than you thought! It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wise. I'll say what I always say when I discover new board software — give me a run for my money. Good luck!
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  haha oh totallllyyy. i started writing the backend back in february of last year and i just had issue after issue, but overall super fun to solve the problems i'm also curious how you got into making a product around it
- culi 4y ago
  NodeBB is a great piece of software and one of the few modern forums that I'd agree actually holds up to par with the old boards
- swyx 4y ago
  what got you into making forum software? and what kept you going for those 2 years?
- rambambram 4y ago
  NodeBB looks nice. A mobile first experience for a forum was lacking in the old ones. Your blog doesn't seem to have an RSS feed!?
- japanman425 4y ago
  [dead]
- stormdennis 4y ago
  I'm amazed at your pricing but it looks from your community forum activity that you have a market. Well done in an era where everyone expects stuff for free.
- 4y ago
Mimmy 4y ago
I didn't realize how much I missed forums until I saw this. Thank you.
self_awareness 4y ago
Pretty realistic, even downtime is preserved (site is currently offline)
Foobar8568 4y ago
Would ezboard be considered late 90s forum? :o Because it looks relatively modern to me, in my mind, all the late 90s, early 2000 were basically vBulletin forums, with mesdiscussions for the French side of the world.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
talboren 4y ago
Just missing “who’s online” ^^
stonecharioteer 4y ago
Looks like the website got hugged to death.
jhoelzel 4y ago
Oh the things we did to woltlab burning boards. So much stuff that they actually never should be able to do. Like the integration we wrote that would score member uploads by release date and give.. on an FTP server. PHP Chatbot with IRC integration? nooo problemo ;)
Pilottwave 4y ago
It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know" people), this old forum style will never return to its former glory.
- Lolaccount 4y ago
  I cannot tell you how much I disagree. I want rank by reply-date. That, in itself, is (and was) a measure of popularity.
  - yywwbbn 4y ago
    If you have <= 100 people actively posting on the forum than yes.
    - wil421 4y ago
      I’ve been an on and off member of car forums. Lots of forums are broken down into sub forms based on model and years, and then sub topic like general discussion, engine problems, mods and so on. It’s much easier to have a few 100s of people commenting on various parts of the forum than a one single feed like HN.
      - Lolaccount 4y ago
        Exactly the example I was thinking of. Same. You get to control the direction per your interests rather than being sprayed by an algorithm.
      - yywwbbn 4y ago
        Yeah, I guess I should’ve added at least another 0
  - Pilottwave 4y ago
epiphonium 4y ago
Those were the days.
NSMutableSet 4y ago
This is great, and I'm really amused to see that someone is already posting as Lowtax.
eXpl0it3r 4y ago
I wish there were more "modern" old school forum software alternatives, which you can still just throw onto any LAMP stack hosting provider. I think the closest thing I've found is Flarum. I'm predicting that in a decade or two, we'll start to notice, that there's a huge gap in retained information, because so many online interactions moved into closed systems, such as social media pages or Discord servers, which aren't well or at all indexed and we might have permanently lost some platforms along the way.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  FlaskBB is pretty good. It uses Flask as the name implies which is a Python framework, but beyond that you don't need anything really startling to get it going. It containerises reasonably nicely too. I've been running https://rangerovers.pub https://rangerovers.pub on it for about five or six years now.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
This project idea is one I have for a long time now: Build a proper forum, like the ones I used to frequent back in the day, but with a modern programming language, applying all the coding-fu I have learned since then. However, it is a big task, so I have not yet started ... Maybe I should think of an iterative strategy to get there and go step by step.
- sneak 4y ago
  I started one in golang but haven't had enough time to work on it much yet. Want to collaborate?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sneak 4y ago
I put in a 20 character random alphanumeric password and it wouldn't let me use it because it didn't have a symbol. Please don't enforce password complexity requirements other than length.
nazgulsenpai 4y ago
I absolutely love this. Thank you.
geuis 4y ago
This is incredibly difficult to read and takes up entirely too much space. https://basementcommunity.com/forums/12 https://basementcommunity.com/forums/12 All of that post info could be condensed to one or two lines. The alternating colors don't easily distinguish between different posts.
TrackerFF 4y ago
The old-school sequential form still works, BUT...it needs moderation. All the time. I still browse similar forums, but the second someone derails a thread, or people start arguing between each others, the browsing experience turns to sh!t. The reddit / HN format fixed this. People can discuss endlessly between themselves, without ruining the thread. People can post completely irrelevant stuff, without ruining the thread. The import stuff floats to the top, while the less important bits sink to the bottom. With the sequential form, you're pretty much forced to endure - unless mods are quick enough to remove posts.
- LemmyInThePub 4y ago
  > The reddit / HN format fixed this God no! On Reddit (and lately HN) cretins will up/downvote depending on whether or not they agree or disagree with a post, not because of the quality of the writing. This leads to groupthink and prevents popular ideas being challenged. Allowing posts to be downvoted simply because somebody disagrees with them (rather than because the post detracts from the discussion) is both pathetic and eventually leads to stagnation.
testmasterflex 4y ago
Love the design. Not sure why but page requests are slow on my phone, I’d fix that.
dehugger 4y ago
Joined! Hope the community ends up taking off a bit, it would be fun to have new/smaller community to become a part of. Joining large existing boards often feels pointless due to the insular groups of regulars with a history going back a decade or longer, not that I blame them.
iddan 4y ago
This is so cool. I was just thinking a few months ago how much I miss old school forums. Everybody already said it here but Slack is not searchable, and not suited for communal async communication.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
"early 2000s"? You know forums like this are from more like mid-2000s to mid-2010s right. Another one of these weird gen-Z no-history takes. Also, the point of this was coding your own I guess? The 'old school' forum software still exists and runs. Not to mention more updated and modern takes like Discourse.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  ok man
overgard 4y ago
Man, I miss those, reminds me of being a teenager. I think they never survived because it was such a tenuous balance, either you didn't have enough people and it was a ghost town, or you had too many and it was a free for all. I feel like things like facebook groups and twitter kinda solved those problems by wrapping them in a larger ecosystem, but at the cost of feeling corporate and generic. The wild west internet couldn't really last, but it had a lot of charm.

373 points by partly_cloudy 4y ago

Apart from the poor performance which surprised me considering I would expect it to be light, this is awesome and I for one sure miss an internet like this. It's so corporate now...

partly_cloudy 4y ago
hey i'd love to know more if you wouldn't mind helping! where exactly in the world are you located and in what ways are you seeing poor performance?

borowiak 4y ago

Looks great! One element that is missing for those nostalgia vibes that was super common at the time is a visitors counter.

Lolaccount 4y ago

My god, that takes me back to the good old days. Love it. Well done.

partly_cloudy 4y ago

built in remix.run with a Python backend, basementcommunity is a nod to early forums from the early 2000s like something awful and fark, focusing on manual moderation and discussions happen in chronological order

deleted 4y ago
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bartread 4y ago
I like it. Never noticed a forum with a wall of shame before even though I lurked on a few old skool car forums in the mid-2000s. I do remember a heck of a scrap occurring sometime 2005/6 between 300zx.co.uk and a couple of the other forums of the time. Loads of people banned, even longtime users, site admins, committee members. It was a mess.
- floren 4y ago
  The "wall of shame" on this site comes pretty directly from the Something Awful forums Leper's Colony: https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php
  - partly_cloudy 4y ago
    yup
quadrature 4y ago
I've been playing around with remix and i come from a python backend. would love to know more about how you mix these two ?. Is the backend essentially just a rest API with a handoff to remix for rendering ?.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  yep the Python backend is a standalone rest API and the FE is running on a completely separate server
jay-barronville 4y ago
Why Remix with a Python backend? Did you need Python for anything specific? Is there some specific need that a pure Remix backend couldn’t give you? Just curious.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  actually at the time i wrote the API, i was still considering how the FE was going to be written, so because i never used remix until this point, i didn't realize they offered an all-in-one solution. honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust
  - Kiro 4y ago
    So why even use Remix? Maybe I misunderstand what it is.
    - Ralfp 4y ago
      With Remix, you run two two servers: - Remix server - API server When user visits your page, their first HTTP request hits the Remix, which pulls data from API server and renders initial HTTP response from your React.js UI. It then sends this response to the client, so you see full site load at one time, even with JavaScript off. If you have JavaScript enabled, the client version of the React.js UI will load and replace the HTML generated on server, making things interactive. This UI will hit Remix API server for Remix features, but you can still hit your API server from individual components if you need.
ricopags 4y ago
any plans to share the code? I've been thinking of rebooting a crappy club for jerks and this looks like it could be a great jumping off point if you'd be willing to share

theknocker 4y ago

[dead]

nonethewiser 4y ago

I love it. I was recently nostalgic about phpbb forums. Thought it would be cool to build a site like that. How is the SEO? Seems like poor SEO (never mind Reddit) was one of the reasons they really fell off the map.

partly_cloudy 4y ago
remix has some good built-in APIs for creating SEO-performant pages. everything is server-side rendered for starters, but it's also easy to add meta tags for each page in your react component routes

carabiner 4y ago

You can still go to these. Genmay.com is still on life support.

wolrah 4y ago
As is Something Awful, which OP lists as inspiration. The forums are apparently still self sustaining financially, but I don't believe the user count has moved significantly for around a decade. It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
- carabiner 4y ago
  The main thing is the chronological ordering and lack of karma ordering leads to more freewheeling, breezy conversations. People aren't ego posting as much and are more liberal with speaking their minds, even if their views are unpopular. There are less flamewars, though you also miss out on some deeper discussions. This is also why I like Blind so much, where anonymity has caused it to be the best source of advice on tech careers by a mile. Blunt, harsh advice there has been life-changing.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    Additionally, topics being sorted by "what post received a comment most recently" meant that high-quality threads stayed near the top for a long time, leading to much better discoverability. When I want to learn a lot about some obscure hobby, a dedicated forum is an extremely good place to go. Read the top 5-10 threads in most of the categories, and you've got a fantastic jumping off point.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      This is a major difference. Reddit, Hackernews, and others are more "24 hour news cycle". Built to churn out new and bury old.

t09i209ba893 4y ago

Cool, is source available? I didn't see it.

partly_cloudy 4y ago
not yet, but definitely in the future!
- aetherspawn 4y ago
  We would love to see the source code for this also. Would be very nostalgic to self-host an instance for personal use.
  - thenipper 4y ago
    Same! It has a nice vibe that'd be great for like keeping in touch with friends

cecida 4y ago

Early 2000s message boards were so much fun. vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up. Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.

scrlk 4y ago
> hilariously awful moderation > (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST) > Thread locked: use the search function next time followed by... > (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST) > Thread locked: don't necropost :^)
edgyquant 4y ago
>hilariously awful moderation I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war
- reb 4y ago
  Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.
  - tfgg 4y ago
    Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse. Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  I'm always surprised by this when these types of threads come up on HN. A lot of people seem to remember these forums being moderated poorly, or being run by egomaniacs. My experience is the opposite. The internet forums I spent any time on were generally run by passionate people who cared about the community and donated their time to help keep them running smoothly. I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.

1970-01-01 4y ago

AOL Server is still kickin https://sourceforge.net/projects/aolserver/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/aolserver/

deleted 4y ago
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glonq 4y ago

After reddit implodes, I vote that we bring back forums and/or BBS's

ddejohn 4y ago
All for -- as long as we can use markdown instead of BBCode. I hate BBCode.
EarlKing 4y ago
Why wait? AWS and DigitalOcean are dirt cheap. Go set something up and have fun. A number of communities have already forked from Reddit and seem to be doing just fine. As long as you have something interesting to talk about then people will come.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
codazoda 4y ago
I built an “ssh shell” with this in mind. It’s actually just a hello world app that prompts for your name, because it turns out that’s all you need. Someday I may build a modern BBS via ssh. Yes, I’m aware you can use telnet, but I thought SSH felt more modern. https://github.com/codazoda/goshell https://github.com/codazoda/goshell
zirgs 4y ago
I already moved from reddit to neogaf. It's nice - nobody bans you for saying that GTA should not be censored. And discussions about politics are banned.
deleted 4y ago
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fwungy 4y ago

Nice Gemini-esque type feel.

mtlynch 4y ago

Congrats this looks really cool! As someone who grew up in the heyday of these message boards, I appreciate the throwback. I also like the sports board title (though, technically, it should be "we like sportz").

partly_cloudy 4y ago
dang good call!! updated!!!
- mtlynch 4y ago
  That's kablamo!

Klonoar 4y ago

Can I just say that you've done a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of old school forums without going overboard into old school UI/UX? The spacing, font choices and just general layout feel modern enough without being overbearing. It's very pleasant to browse.

eterm 4y ago
It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back. Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way. It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  I'm discussing UI/UX, not the stack. The back button is... something else here.
  - 100721 4y ago
    I think the back button fits perfectly into the UI/UX. It is, quite literally, part of the UI. We don't have much control over the UI portion, but it is firmly in the realm of UX.
    - Klonoar 4y ago
      UX, maybe. UI? No, not even remotely in the conversation. The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.

paulpauper 4y ago

Hacker News is like a late '90s forum in terms of minimalism, but it has a sick backend. same for Wikipedia and craigslist. That is usually how it is: simple frontend, technical backend

xwdv 4y ago
The backend is not that sick. Just a simple program running on some PC under someone’s desk somewhere.

Felger 4y ago

The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO. The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo. Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)

vinrob92 4y ago
Another one is https://www.guitariste.com/forums/ https://www.guitariste.com/forums/ since 2000!
deleted 4y ago
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nonethewiser 4y ago
I love the UI but making each comment an HTML table is making me very uncomfortable.
- krapp 4y ago
  You may not want to view source on HN then.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    wow did not expect that! interesting
    - beardog 4y ago
      You can export photos as html tables from GIMP for some reason too, example: https://chaoswebs.net/pepe/ https://chaoswebs.net/pepe/

blueridge 4y ago

I see the Wall of Shame already has a solid foundation.

rqtwteye 4y ago

People think I am insane but I often think forums would be way better than Slack or Teams for company collaboration.

bombcar 4y ago
Forums are so much better for threaded conversations than anything else it’s amazing. All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.
- ddejohn 4y ago
  I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion. Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft. I guess I'm conflating a few different things here. I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
  - vouaobrasil 4y ago
    Check out DPreview.com. They have threaded view done right. It's much better than this forum for threads because you can see a hierarchical index of all posts, whereas popular threads here only have the first thread easily visible if it's really long and by the time the discussion gets into past depth 3 it's usually quite boring here.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Forums work best when there’s a community that curates things into threads and sub forums when necessary. If they’re basically used as an infinitely long chat record they’re not as strong (though the archiving is inherently better there).

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago

Baen's Bar[0] (the forum for Baen publishing) is very early internet as well. [0] https://baensbar.net/ https://baensbar.net/ but you'll have to register to see anything good

deleted 4y ago
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quickthrower2 4y ago

Legendary: https://basementcommunity.com/offenses https://basementcommunity.com/offenses

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

blueridge 4y ago

Anyone play World of Warcraft back in the day? Remember Elitist Jerks, their forum? Great place for solid gameplay discussion. And the general social threads in the Benefactors Bar were excellent. They had strict writing rules and moderators enforced the use of good grammar and complete sentences. https://web.archive.org/web/20080913011707/http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php https://web.archive.org/web/20080913011707/http://elitistjer... https://web.archive.org/web/20080921165026/http://elitistjerks.com/f34/t32399-warning_ivriniel_grammar/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080921165026/http://elitistjer... "Please don't use chatroom abbreviations like "ofc". Mostly a good post, so only a warning - just try to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Thanks. Also, for future reference: the word "I" should be capitalized." Gold.

iafiaf 4y ago
Didn't think I'd see EJ mentioned here. I distinctly recall planning and reading raiding strategies in there fur hours. I think there largest Onyxia thread was started by me. Glorious times.
- blueridge 4y ago
  Glorious indeed. Mal'Ganis represent!
deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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chrisoconnell 4y ago
The GM of Elitist Jerks was Ion Hazzikostas, now Game Director of World of Warcraft.

spiritplumber 4y ago

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/turbo-necro-book-of-revelation-rpg.5463/page-2 https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/turbo-necro-book-of-... I am to blame for a 20-year necropost.

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Aeolun 4y ago

This is way too flat to be a 2000s era forum. But it looks nice. I’m not sure about thread display on mobile though. The table format seems like it takes way too much space for the post count display. Also, navigating back somehow keeps the existing page after swiping, and then janks back to the previous page after 200ms or so. Not sure what causes that.

anyfoo 4y ago
> This is way too flat to be a 2000s era forum. I guess that makes it "2000s-inspired". I think it's fine if the visual style of the 2000s eras isn't retained, as long as the character is the same (e.g. linear threads, and threads that are ranked by last reply instead of upvotes).
deleted 4y ago
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lvxferre 4y ago

The interface is amazing. Clean, it doesn't leave huge amounts of empty space that scream "this was made for phone users, everyone else might fuck off", and the subforums already hint "we want to gather political dissidents". It feels like the 00s forums without looking like one, it's the best of both worlds. I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three different errors (capital letters required, special characters required, min length required). However, I feel like a user hitting this issue accidentally would've given up after the third try. Perhaps it could be worth to check for multiple errors at once, and output them all to the user; e.g. "The password must mix case, and contain special characters, and have a minimum length of 8". Just an idea/feedback, mind you.

account42 4y ago
> special characters required This one is super annoying. A long password without special characters is not any less secure than a short password with one special character added because it was required. Better than arbitrary requirements like this would be to estimate the entropy and then just prevent low-entropy passwords (or only tell the user - not everyone needs the same level of security for everything).

andy_andy_andy 4y ago

_incredible_ how quickly hacker news visitors start posting slurs

Arrath 4y ago
Oh you saw that thread by poster 'aaaaa' also? I registered just to tell them to fuck off but by the time I did the thread had been deleted. Way to go moderation!
- andy_andy_andy 4y ago
  i've seen about half a dozen in the past 2 hours
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Yeesh.
    - partly_cloudy 4y ago
      so annoying -_-
- idiocrat 4y ago
  It seems the forum is too generic, has no specialization, and has no seeded curated content. So if some CRM company has their demo/demo portal, I also post aaaaaaaaaa to check the basic functionality, not hoping this will ever take off. I also post very long aaaaaaa....aaaaaaa to see how the interface deals with overflow. Anyway whatever I post will be refreshed next day.
  - partly_cloudy 4y ago
    he had a racist ass username so i changed it
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Yeah it wasn't the guy's username at the time that was the issue, it was the content of the thread he created but I wasn't going to repeat it in polite company here.

partyguy 4y ago

That looks awesome! I do miss the "old" web2.0 with it's forums, message boards and the characistic designs. I always appreciate any throwback/retro web projects! Great work!

Vapormac 4y ago

The (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) is chef's kiss

sithadmin 4y ago
:10bux:
idiocrat 4y ago
This turned me off. The reason given for the ban that the user has used Dostoevsky's book title as his handle name.
- jszymborski 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure the username was changed to IDIOT so that the offensive name would no longer be shown. There are far worse usernames than idiot on there.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  yeah he just had some stupid racist username
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Aeolun 4y ago

> Registrations are currently turned off. Wut? It would have been nice to know this before I spent effort filling out all information and generating a password.

partly_cloudy 4y ago
sorry man. this guy won't leave the site alone and keeps posting really racist shit despite me continuing to block his IP addresses over and over.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Got it. I found out after reading the rest of the thread. Hope you can figure out the culprit, or he’ll just forget about it after a day. May be worth showing that message on the registration page right from the start if/when registrations are turned off.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    or just hand out invites to people on hn who have an email listed.
    - partly_cloudy 4y ago
      i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again
      - aliqot 4y ago
        Walk in, 'user is on probation for this post'. Just like home :) Good luck with it
      - Aeolun 4y ago
        Even if it looks like the 2000’s it’s clearly the 20s, where you cannot even post your site on a civilized forum without attracting the trolls… Anyway, I made a pending account now :)

Thorentis 4y ago

I had this random idea where I could start a new forum like this, but make it appear popular by seeding it with hundreds of users who are just ChatGPT. Wouldn't be surprised if this is already being done by some sites. Dead Internet Theory is real.

userbinator 4y ago
I actually came across sites like that before, although the coherency of the posts were definitely far worse than ChatGPT as that was before its invention. Looked more like the typical SEO spam than anything else.

andreygrehov 4y ago

https://bitcointalk.org/ https://bitcointalk.org/ is still running SMF (created in 2006) and looks pretty old school.

throwaway81523 4y ago

It loads a huge chunk of obfuscated javascript buildshared something something. I thought that was more recent than early 2000s. Also it loads fonts from google. It all seems way too modern. The main forum I remember using in that era was Webcrossing, which was more like Hacker News in being mostly text, though (my preference) not threaded. Usenet was also still going strong back then. Added: it is quite hard to use with lynx. I think it is best to not depend on much layout from the browser. I used WebX with lynx all the time and it was fine. Not saying this is a bad forum in general terms, but I think if it is aiming for retro appeal, it doesn't go far enough.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pbj1968 4y ago
Lynx?!? Sir, I mean no disrespect, but it may be time to move away from your 1996 dumb terminal.
- throwaway81523 4y ago
  Early 2000s forums should work fine with 1996 terminals.
- account42 4y ago
  Lynx does require ANSI escape codes so someone using it is quite clearly not using a TERM=dumb terminal.

BFLpL0QNek 4y ago

Nice design. I miss the 2000s forums. They were a great source of information that was easy to read, search and for search engines to index. As the posts where often by enthusiasts they were a treasure trove, especially the automotive forums for repair information. The closest we have now is Reddit but doesn’t feel the same and the UX certainly isn’t as good even comparing to 2000s hobbyists installing vanilla Vbulletin and tweaking colours and a few plugins. A lot of the forums I visited that died, died because success made hosting to expensive as the only option was vertical scaling the database and hard to moneytorise, then things like private Facebook groups took away the various cliques. I often wondered if I could create a horizontal scalable forum to make hosting costs trivial. Topics are a natural partition key and old posts are heavily cacheable with only recent posts needing lower cache ttls. I think the deployment complexity would be too much for hobbyist though.

anyfoo 4y ago
They seem to make a comeback of sorts. I know a few podcasts at least that have gathered their community in "old school" web forums. Some of them literally use the old phpBB, but some use much more modern and mature software, that is a pleasure to use. They all however still adhere to the linear (non-tree) thread model. You can answer to individual posts and they are then linked together, but all posts still appear in chronological order under the thread. It really works, and feels much more like a community, like it did in the old days. There are also some really long-lived threads, things don't age out quickly as they do on reddit and HN. Threads are ranked by recent activity, not by upvotes. I don't know why they make a comeback. Maybe a combination of the realization that the old forums just worked better for community building, and Facebook (which I think was indeed a large driver of the "forum death" of the 2010s) fading.
- wyclif 4y ago
  There are still a lot of these old phpBB style forums in the wild, and some of them are still going strong. I have in mind TDPRI, Steve Hoffman, and Whiteblaze: https://www.tdpri.com/ https://www.tdpri.com/ https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/ https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/ https://whiteblaze.net/ https://whiteblaze.net/

Ocha 4y ago

There are real forums from early 2000 running on early 2000 code. Check out https://forum.ge/ https://forum.ge/

krapp 4y ago
Matt's Script Archive is still around[0]. There are even some WWWBoards still in the wild too. http://www.scriptarchive.com/ http://www.scriptarchive.com/

edwinyzh 4y ago

Well done! The forum feels very nice to the eyes!

chrisco255 4y ago

Great job! Also love the little details like the web ring animated .gif at the bottom that points to a live, working web ring on Neocities.

matt3210 4y ago

Beautiful!

RankingMember 4y ago

Hmm, I'm not receiving an activation/confirmation email and can't post- do I need to wait to be admitted or is there something I'm doing wrong? Edit: Haha nice old school Lonely Island reference in the Sports sub-forum subtitle

partly_cloudy 4y ago
yep you need to be manually approved for now! you should be good to post now but let me know if you're still locked out
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

atdixon 4y ago

Beautiful! Would you ever consider building/porting this to nostr? https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/

slotrans 4y ago

I love how fast it is. I used to hang out on a lot of phpBB and vBulletin forums, and one thing that puzzles me in retrospect is why their performance was so terrible. I can certainly understand how the first versions would be not so great, but the authors released many new versions over the years that tweaked the styling and added a few features but the performance was always awful. Seems like if the authors had put their minds to it those forums could have been super fast, which everyone would have loved because slow forums translated into bigger hosting costs...

Aloha 4y ago
Most of them were on overloaded shared hosting boxes. I know this because I worked for hosting providers in that era.
- slotrans 4y ago
  Oh for sure. But doesn't that increase the returns to making the code more efficient? I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. My memory tells me it would usually be in the 30-something range, maybe 50-something. It could have been 1!
  - anthonyhn 4y ago
    >I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. It might have been Simple Machine Forum (SMF). The footer has the number of queries and number of seconds it took to generate the page (in my case, their community forum index page used 9 queries and took ~0.3 seconds to generate). https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php#footer
- RajT88 4y ago
  Yep. That's how it went with my friends and I hosting phpBB for many years on a linux-based hosting provider. When I spun up YAF.Net on an AWS IIS server, with a same-machine backend of SQLEXPRESS, it ran like a champ for years with hardly a blip. 16 bucks a month. It wasn't ever really snappy, per se, but at least it was consistent and didn't bog down.

exodust 4y ago

Why talk in past tense about forums? Still plenty of active forums. These days they are topic-specific, product specific. Some I've visited recently: https://fuckcombustion.com/ https://fuckcombustion.com/ https://forums.unrealengine.com/ https://forums.unrealengine.com/ https://forum.1010music.com https://forum.1010music.com Every game on Steam has its own "forum"... https://steamcommunity.com/app/1167630/discussions/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1167630/discussions/ This Australian forum is one of the few big ones with general topics and a nice readable design that hasn't changed in decades. Certain sub forums like news get unlocked once you're proven not a troll. https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ https://gearspace.com/board/ https://gearspace.com/board/ Too many to list! Even Roger Deakins (cinematographer) has his own forum: https://www.rogerdeakins.com/forums/ https://www.rogerdeakins.com/forums/

Apocryphon 4y ago
Yeah I feel like there’s a corollary to Eternal September where while the common areas of the Internet might be flooded with n00bs, the places that are less than user-friendly may remain intact to the curmudgeonly and the niche. Old school forums are alive in general, even if in specifics many communities are slowly dwindling, completely unmonetizeable, or if they’re dwarfed by Twitter, Reddit, YouTube comment sections, etc.
userbinator 4y ago
These days they are topic-specific, product specific Almost all automotive forums fall in that category... here's a tiny sample of what's out there: https://www.v8buick.com/index.php https://www.v8buick.com/index.php https://www.newcaprice.com/forum/ https://www.newcaprice.com/forum/ https://www.crownvic.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=cfrm https://www.crownvic.net/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=cfrm https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/ https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/
pell 4y ago
While a lot of forums still exist, I think the amount of active communities has definitely declined. I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them died because people eventually moved to other platforms. The way I see it, what made a forum great was the community, a constant stream of active posts and engagement. To me they were a hangout spot, a venue of entertainment more than anything else. These hangout spots seemed to have shifted to social media platforms for a lot of people. Another issue seems to have been a decision by Google to devalue forum posts. Those used to be very common search results 5-10 years ago. It's pretty rare these days.

flykespice 4y ago

back when sites were efficient on user-experience and perfomance

teolandon 4y ago

I haven't been this excited to jump in and post in a community in a while. There's just something so inviting in commenting on a thread knowing that your post will be there, in order, and won't be lost in the noise even if you didn't show up early. I had a whole post written out on a thread, but apparently I need to wait for approval. Bit of a bummer but we'll see how long that takes. Good luck!

partly_cloudy 4y ago
hey sorry about that - you should be approved now and i went ahead and added a message for un-approved users so they'll know before they make a post
euoia 4y ago
Same. It would have been nice to know that I need approval before writing out my post.
- partly_cloudy 4y ago
  hey sorry about that - you should be approved now and i went ahead and added a message for un-approved users so they'll know before they make a post
- account42 4y ago
  Requiring approval for the first couple of posts from new users is one of the most sensible anti-spam policies. I'd much rather see more of that than the current forced AI training labor favored by most sites.

braingenious 4y ago

I see that there’s an “SA refugee” thread… is this meant to be another one of those or is that just a joke? Historically SA spinoffs haven’t turned out to be the best communities. edit: Horse Porn Junction motwithstanding, of course

DoItToMe81 4y ago
At the moment, SomethingAwful has probably the worst moderation in the existence of the site. It's a strictly controlled echo chamber that thousands of people have left. It might be legit.
- braingenious 4y ago
  As a super old-timer, that sounds a bit hyperbolic. I guess if you don’t remember aussie jim or Pele then yeah I could see not liking the mods, especially if you’re like, a D&D poster. Then again, D&D posters have perpetually lived in the worst period of moderation in human history since the migration off UBB.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ricopags 4y ago
might want to delete the comment, or at least the edit. you should really know better
- braingenious 4y ago
  ??? Did you not have an account on HPJ?
  - ricopags 4y ago
    did I or do I?
    - 4y ago

salamwaddah 4y ago

remove mobile responsiveness

julianlam 4y ago

As the maintainer of a self-proclaimed "modern" forum software, I always get really excited when new board software comes out. You've probably discovered that building forum software is a lot more complicated than it looks. Those early boards really had a lot more going on under the hood than you thought! It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wise. I'll say what I always say when I discover new board software — give me a run for my money. Good luck!

partly_cloudy 4y ago
haha oh totallllyyy. i started writing the backend back in february of last year and i just had issue after issue, but overall super fun to solve the problems i'm also curious how you got into making a product around it
culi 4y ago
NodeBB is a great piece of software and one of the few modern forums that I'd agree actually holds up to par with the old boards
swyx 4y ago
what got you into making forum software? and what kept you going for those 2 years?
rambambram 4y ago
NodeBB looks nice. A mobile first experience for a forum was lacking in the old ones. Your blog doesn't seem to have an RSS feed!?
japanman425 4y ago
[dead]
stormdennis 4y ago
I'm amazed at your pricing but it looks from your community forum activity that you have a market. Well done in an era where everyone expects stuff for free.
4y ago

Mimmy 4y ago

I didn't realize how much I missed forums until I saw this. Thank you.

self_awareness 4y ago

Pretty realistic, even downtime is preserved (site is currently offline)

Foobar8568 4y ago

Would ezboard be considered late 90s forum? :o Because it looks relatively modern to me, in my mind, all the late 90s, early 2000 were basically vBulletin forums, with mesdiscussions for the French side of the world.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

talboren 4y ago

Just missing “who’s online” ^^

stonecharioteer 4y ago

Looks like the website got hugged to death.

jhoelzel 4y ago

Oh the things we did to woltlab burning boards. So much stuff that they actually never should be able to do. Like the integration we wrote that would score member uploads by release date and give.. on an FTP server. PHP Chatbot with IRC integration? nooo problemo ;)

Pilottwave 4y ago

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know" people), this old forum style will never return to its former glory.

Lolaccount 4y ago
I cannot tell you how much I disagree. I want rank by reply-date. That, in itself, is (and was) a measure of popularity.
- yywwbbn 4y ago
  If you have <= 100 people actively posting on the forum than yes.
  - wil421 4y ago
    I’ve been an on and off member of car forums. Lots of forums are broken down into sub forms based on model and years, and then sub topic like general discussion, engine problems, mods and so on. It’s much easier to have a few 100s of people commenting on various parts of the forum than a one single feed like HN.
    - Lolaccount 4y ago
      Exactly the example I was thinking of. Same. You get to control the direction per your interests rather than being sprayed by an algorithm.
    - yywwbbn 4y ago
      Yeah, I guess I should’ve added at least another 0
- Pilottwave 4y ago

epiphonium 4y ago

Those were the days.

NSMutableSet 4y ago

This is great, and I'm really amused to see that someone is already posting as Lowtax.

eXpl0it3r 4y ago

I wish there were more "modern" old school forum software alternatives, which you can still just throw onto any LAMP stack hosting provider. I think the closest thing I've found is Flarum. I'm predicting that in a decade or two, we'll start to notice, that there's a huge gap in retained information, because so many online interactions moved into closed systems, such as social media pages or Discord servers, which aren't well or at all indexed and we might have permanently lost some platforms along the way.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
FlaskBB is pretty good. It uses Flask as the name implies which is a Python framework, but beyond that you don't need anything really startling to get it going. It containerises reasonably nicely too. I've been running https://rangerovers.pub https://rangerovers.pub on it for about five or six years now.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

This project idea is one I have for a long time now: Build a proper forum, like the ones I used to frequent back in the day, but with a modern programming language, applying all the coding-fu I have learned since then. However, it is a big task, so I have not yet started ... Maybe I should think of an iterative strategy to get there and go step by step.

sneak 4y ago
I started one in golang but haven't had enough time to work on it much yet. Want to collaborate?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sneak 4y ago

I put in a 20 character random alphanumeric password and it wouldn't let me use it because it didn't have a symbol. Please don't enforce password complexity requirements other than length.

nazgulsenpai 4y ago

I absolutely love this. Thank you.

geuis 4y ago

This is incredibly difficult to read and takes up entirely too much space. https://basementcommunity.com/forums/12 https://basementcommunity.com/forums/12 All of that post info could be condensed to one or two lines. The alternating colors don't easily distinguish between different posts.

TrackerFF 4y ago

The old-school sequential form still works, BUT...it needs moderation. All the time. I still browse similar forums, but the second someone derails a thread, or people start arguing between each others, the browsing experience turns to sh!t. The reddit / HN format fixed this. People can discuss endlessly between themselves, without ruining the thread. People can post completely irrelevant stuff, without ruining the thread. The import stuff floats to the top, while the less important bits sink to the bottom. With the sequential form, you're pretty much forced to endure - unless mods are quick enough to remove posts.

LemmyInThePub 4y ago
> The reddit / HN format fixed this God no! On Reddit (and lately HN) cretins will up/downvote depending on whether or not they agree or disagree with a post, not because of the quality of the writing. This leads to groupthink and prevents popular ideas being challenged. Allowing posts to be downvoted simply because somebody disagrees with them (rather than because the post detracts from the discussion) is both pathetic and eventually leads to stagnation.

testmasterflex 4y ago

Love the design. Not sure why but page requests are slow on my phone, I’d fix that.

dehugger 4y ago

Joined! Hope the community ends up taking off a bit, it would be fun to have new/smaller community to become a part of. Joining large existing boards often feels pointless due to the insular groups of regulars with a history going back a decade or longer, not that I blame them.

iddan 4y ago

This is so cool. I was just thinking a few months ago how much I miss old school forums. Everybody already said it here but Slack is not searchable, and not suited for communal async communication.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

"early 2000s"? You know forums like this are from more like mid-2000s to mid-2010s right. Another one of these weird gen-Z no-history takes. Also, the point of this was coding your own I guess? The 'old school' forum software still exists and runs. Not to mention more updated and modern takes like Discourse.

partly_cloudy 4y ago
ok man

overgard 4y ago

Man, I miss those, reminds me of being a teenager. I think they never survived because it was such a tenuous balance, either you didn't have enough people and it was a ghost town, or you had too many and it was a free for all. I feel like things like facebook groups and twitter kinda solved those problems by wrapping them in a larger ecosystem, but at the cost of feeling corporate and generic. The wild west internet couldn't really last, but it had a lot of charm.