Back in 1998 a German webtech forum installed its first forum software, if I remember correctly it was WWWBoard out of Matt's Script Archive. They soon got bett

Back in 1998 a German webtech forum installed its first forum software, if I remember correctly it was WWWBoard out of Matt's Script Archive. They soon got better software over time [1]. But something the community was and is sure about was a preference for threaded discussions. WWWBoard must have been inspired by the Usenet – and for meandering discussions with many sub discussions it still is perfect, I think. We then looked down on those flat bulletin boards – but then the Usenet people were looking down on us Web people. But to be sincere: In a way threaded and flat are just different views on the same date. From a modern web forum I’d expect a switch button for different views or even maybe a combination of those two: A visualization of the thread structure on the left, a flat list of posts on the right. What speaks against threaded, sadly, is the rise of mobile: You can’t very good display an even more indented structure on a small portrait screen. Another cultural technique lost. [1] WWWW Board was replaced soon by as custom Perl Software which then because of resource constraints was replaced by a server in C which then later was replaced by a Rails application and now it is written in Elixir. But there is a clear lineage and the archive was always converted and goes back a quarter century. I feel old.