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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

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/
- citizenkeen 4y ago
  With all the people wishing for forums but not wanting to host, I'm surprised nobody had made a Discord-for-forums. Threaded, not reddit.
  - api 4y ago
    I hope not. It would become another closed unindexable ad plastered silo. Check out the fandom wikis for an example of how it would probably look.
    - account42 4y ago
      If only Fandom wikis were unindexable - then they would not be drowining out community run wikis in search results for games where those still exist. Running a site that is primarily community content and profiting from ads always seems a bit scummy to me. Particularly odd that this one is co-founded by the same Jimmy Wales better known for Wikipedia.
  - tennisflyi 4y ago
    Discord has a forum channel - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
  - freddie_mercury 4y ago
    That's exactly what Discourse is. It's been around for almost a decade. Some people hate the UI. Some examples running it https://forums.woot.com/ https://forums.woot.com/ https://forum.newrelic.com/s/ https://forum.newrelic.com/s/ https://community.revolut.com/ https://community.revolut.com/ https://forums.docker.com/ https://forums.docker.com/ https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
    - julianlam 4y ago
      > Some people hate the UI. ... and it always surprises me a bit that people just assume Discourse is the only option and stop looking. Look at Flarum, look at NodeBB. Both are making strides while staying true to the original forum threaded model. (N.B. I maintain NodeBB)
noduerme 4y ago
There are still some quality 90s-style automotive forums around, and many take donations. A steel guitar forum I'm on charges a nominal $5/year. Reddit may have breadth of scale, but these have depth and expertise that makes it worth keeping them going.
- anon7725 4y ago
  These forums are still very popular in automotive and RVing. Most car and RV brands have a very active instance.
girvo 4y ago
The Atomic MPC forums were amazing when I was growing up. I miss them, Facebook effectively killed it sadly.
Natsu 4y ago
Pre-eternal September usenet was great, we just needed better anti-spam solutions than killfiles.
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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/
citizenkeen 4y ago
With all the people wishing for forums but not wanting to host, I'm surprised nobody had made a Discord-for-forums. Threaded, not reddit.
- api 4y ago
  I hope not. It would become another closed unindexable ad plastered silo. Check out the fandom wikis for an example of how it would probably look.
  - account42 4y ago
    If only Fandom wikis were unindexable - then they would not be drowining out community run wikis in search results for games where those still exist. Running a site that is primarily community content and profiting from ads always seems a bit scummy to me. Particularly odd that this one is co-founded by the same Jimmy Wales better known for Wikipedia.
- tennisflyi 4y ago
  Discord has a forum channel - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...
- freddie_mercury 4y ago
  That's exactly what Discourse is. It's been around for almost a decade. Some people hate the UI. Some examples running it https://forums.woot.com/ https://forums.woot.com/ https://forum.newrelic.com/s/ https://forum.newrelic.com/s/ https://community.revolut.com/ https://community.revolut.com/ https://forums.docker.com/ https://forums.docker.com/ https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/
  - julianlam 4y ago
    > Some people hate the UI. ... and it always surprises me a bit that people just assume Discourse is the only option and stop looking. Look at Flarum, look at NodeBB. Both are making strides while staying true to the original forum threaded model. (N.B. I maintain NodeBB)

noduerme 4y ago

There are still some quality 90s-style automotive forums around, and many take donations. A steel guitar forum I'm on charges a nominal $5/year. Reddit may have breadth of scale, but these have depth and expertise that makes it worth keeping them going.

anon7725 4y ago
These forums are still very popular in automotive and RVing. Most car and RV brands have a very active instance.

girvo 4y ago

The Atomic MPC forums were amazing when I was growing up. I miss them, Facebook effectively killed it sadly.

Natsu 4y ago

Pre-eternal September usenet was great, we just needed better anti-spam solutions than killfiles.

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