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I'm unironically convinced that vBulletin forums are to date the highest form of discussing many topics online. Not only they are alive and the best resource f

I'm unironically convinced that vBulletin forums are to date the highest form of discussing many topics online. Not only they are alive and the best resource for many things (modding, hardware, radio, photography, specific car brands) but I swear 99% of work-related discussions would benefit from having a forum as their central hub, instead of the split of slack/teams/jira/mails/videocalls.

diggan 2y ago
Hear hear, so sad that many forums disappeared, although as you say, many are still alive. The first (Swedish) forum I was active on, is still around with new threads being posted once every 10 minutes or so, and lots of active discussions. So it's not all doom and gloom, but I do agree I wish more communities used regular forums.
danielbln 2y ago
That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? I would hate a vBulleting as a central hub, it's an information black hole, it's not suitable for tickets (jira), not suitable for real time communication (slack), and so on. It was a product of its time, but I think we found better solutions now.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me. Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.
  - cyberlurker 2y ago
    There was definitely competition for most post count and some forums had reputation.
    - diggan 2y ago
      I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly surface structured "reputation" although of course informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums. Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation. One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.
      - g0db1t 2y ago
        As a certified Swede - Which one is this?
        diggan 2y ago
        Not sure I'd certify you if you're unable to recognize Flashback by description ;)
    - dmonitor 2y ago
      You basically can't give people numbers or statistics because invariably people will try to make that number as big as possible.
  - Meekro 2y ago
    I'd forgotten how much I miss this. If you disagree with someone, you have to reply and explain why-- you can't just downvote and move on.
    - epolanski 2y ago
- wsatb 2y ago
  Have we? I think vBulletin has mostly been replaced with Twitter and Reddit, which are often very difficult to surface information from. I think the major advantage of old forums is the community. You don’t really get the sense of community on a large network, which causes a host of other problems.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Was it seriously the only way to read vBulletin forums? I could just fetch each whole >>1-1000 on old 2ch.net forum topics[1] and Ctrl+F anything I wanted. List of topics were Ctrl+F friendly too. There were party apps that could search all forums with titles, and fetch updates for all topics. vBulletin seemed nothing like that to me, was that really not me being outsider but just how it was? 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20170728043031/https://egg.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/jisaku/1478413388/ 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20170715143439/http://egg.2ch.net/jisaku/subback.html
- epolanski 2y ago
  > That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? There's rarely reasons for that. Example on MBWorld: https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/ https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/ Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum): https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13 https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13 I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions. They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads. > it's not suitable for tickets (jira) You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH. With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far. I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever. Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    Yeah, because 20 years ago we didn't know anything else. I also remember coordinating a guild via a vBulletin, and it was... fine. Would I do that today? Definitely not.
- SecretDreams 2y ago
  It's at least suitable as an archive. Tickets just end up being a place where information and lessons die once the problem is closed out. Sometimes impossible to find an old ticket without considerable searching.
- olyjohn 2y ago
  I mean, have you tried to search a Facebook group, or any of the modern social media? There's not even any way to organize things, except for maybe some sticky posts. Forums were broken up into all sorts of sub-topics, and you could search them by actual keywords, and use real filters. These days the search just shows you shit that they want you to engage with, not what's actually relevant. A well moderated and curated forum is extremely easy to find information on without even searching. You're 100% right though, it's not suitable for real time communication. I wouldn't want it to be. Facebook groups have "chats" now, and it's mega impossible to keep up, and nobody actually reads them.
s_dev 2y ago
They are terrible -- there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit. The voting system is far superior to any FIFO out Pringles can of comments.
- diggan 2y ago
  > there is a reason you're using hacker news It's not because of the threaded comments with vanity-metrics, I can tell you that :) I've gone as far as to write my own HN client that displays HN comments as a flat list of comments, sorted by date that also folds in whatever they replied to as a proper quote, so you can follow along. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png Surely, I cannot be alone in sometimes going extreme lengths to remove this sort of pointless popularity sorting?
  - 0xffff2 2y ago
    > Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png This is super cool! I don't suppose it would be easy to share?
    - diggan 2y ago
      Atm, not easy indeed, it's hacked together code that barely works as-is, with a config that would be an even bigger mystery. Best hope is that I someday feel like cleaning it up and open sourcing it, alternatively you write something simple yourself :) Sorry!
- bluGill 2y ago
  I use HN and reddit because they are a source of interesting third party articles on random topics that then can be discussed in depth. Forums are a source of original discussion on a given topic. Those are very different things that meet very different needs.
- epolanski 2y ago
  > there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit It's a good place to talk stuff that's popular, but discussions fade and die quickly. Also, I still use vBulletin-like forums. Examples from the last decade I still use: mbworld.org for discussing Mercedes cars, bitcointalk, hwupgrade, overclockers.uk and some others. Reddit/Twitter absolutely cannot replace any of those I listed for long lasting specific discussions, they are just unfit.
nonethewiser 2y ago
I think the flat list of comments is strictly worse than a tree for representing a conversation. Although in other ways I do agree with your sentiment. The discussions happening there were usually of higher quality and nuance than you see online now. There are many factors to that though, including some that have nothing to do with vBulletin itself.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The problem with a tree is if the discussion gets long eventually several branches reach a point where someone being discussed in one is just a variation of what is being discusses in a different once and you need to bring the two back.
  - epolanski 2y ago
    Yeah, there's no good/bad solution to this, albeit I would say that today an hybrid of a vBulletin-like forum with task planning capabilities (ala GH Projects, where pretty much every entity is a GH issue) with a sprinkle of AI you can ask stuff for would meet 99.9% of my needs.
  - sph 2y ago
    A low-tech compromise that I find preferable to list or tree is what YouTube does, by having one-level deep trees.
numpad0 2y ago
How? I'm aware that it's the single most used forum software across the English Internet, but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.
- diggan 2y ago
  > but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use. Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:
dfxm12 2y ago
Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't. More than considering what the "best" platform is, I wish my org would pick one thing in each category and stick with it. We don't need teams AND slack. We don't need teams AND zoom... I think that's where the real problem lies. It's harder to get comfortable with the software this way.
- diggan 2y ago
  > Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving towards what you mention would be great. > I think that's where the real problem lies That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams internally", that'd be crazy. The number of times a development community I want to join is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public forum, is something I constantly encounter.
  - anthk 2y ago
    Discord it's a turd. It's a silo. And, if Discord deletes a group, good luck backing up your data. Gone. Forever.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      People are pushing Discord to be something it's not. Discord is a replacement for IRC and Ventrilo/Teamspeak/Mumble. It's NOT a replacement for forums or subreddits, no matter how much people try to push it as one. Yeah, you can't easily back up all your discussions, but most people weren't doing that with IRC anyways.
bluGill 2y ago
Forums can be great, but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this". That makes it hard to follow the latest discussions. The few that do have that concept are great, search them out.
- diggan 2y ago
  > but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this". Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that normally works, is that you go to the last post you remember reading, then continue from there. So start at last page, go back until you remember what you're coming across, continue reading from there. Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though, the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.
- olyjohn 2y ago
  Every time I logged into a forum, it would highlight all the unread posts. The latest post pushed the thread to the top. I'm not sure what forums you used that weren't like that. PHPBB and vBulletin both did that by default.
- Meekro 2y ago
  I used (and ran) phpBB-based forums back in 2007, and even then it would tell you which threads have new posts for you to see.

diggan 2y ago

Hear hear, so sad that many forums disappeared, although as you say, many are still alive. The first (Swedish) forum I was active on, is still around with new threads being posted once every 10 minutes or so, and lots of active discussions. So it's not all doom and gloom, but I do agree I wish more communities used regular forums.

danielbln 2y ago

That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? I would hate a vBulleting as a central hub, it's an information black hole, it's not suitable for tickets (jira), not suitable for real time communication (slack), and so on. It was a product of its time, but I think we found better solutions now.

diggan 2y ago
> Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me. Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.
- cyberlurker 2y ago
  There was definitely competition for most post count and some forums had reputation.
  - diggan 2y ago
    I don't think I've used any forums that at least publicly surface structured "reputation" although of course informal reputation exists everywhere, including forums. Post count yes, that's pretty common. But if the forum you use is any good, they'd actively combat posts/threads that aren't actually contributing to the conversation. One of the biggest and most active forum in Sweden is actually pretty good at this, probably mostly thanks to its ~100 iron fist moderators who do such a great job with cleaning up posts that aren't contributing to the discussions at hand. That it also have a really extensive set of rules also helps.
    - g0db1t 2y ago
      As a certified Swede - Which one is this?
      - diggan 2y ago
        Not sure I'd certify you if you're unable to recognize Flashback by description ;)
  - dmonitor 2y ago
    You basically can't give people numbers or statistics because invariably people will try to make that number as big as possible.
- Meekro 2y ago
  I'd forgotten how much I miss this. If you disagree with someone, you have to reply and explain why-- you can't just downvote and move on.
  - epolanski 2y ago
wsatb 2y ago
Have we? I think vBulletin has mostly been replaced with Twitter and Reddit, which are often very difficult to surface information from. I think the major advantage of old forums is the community. You don’t really get the sense of community on a large network, which causes a host of other problems.
numpad0 2y ago
Was it seriously the only way to read vBulletin forums? I could just fetch each whole >>1-1000 on old 2ch.net forum topics[1] and Ctrl+F anything I wanted. List of topics were Ctrl+F friendly too. There were party apps that could search all forums with titles, and fetch updates for all topics. vBulletin seemed nothing like that to me, was that really not me being outsider but just how it was? 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20170728043031/https://egg.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/jisaku/1478413388/ 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20170715143439/http://egg.2ch.net/jisaku/subback.html
epolanski 2y ago
> That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from? There's rarely reasons for that. Example on MBWorld: https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/ https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/ Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum): https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13 https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13 I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions. They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads. > it's not suitable for tickets (jira) You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH. With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far. I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever. Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.
- danielbln 2y ago
  Yeah, because 20 years ago we didn't know anything else. I also remember coordinating a guild via a vBulletin, and it was... fine. Would I do that today? Definitely not.
SecretDreams 2y ago
It's at least suitable as an archive. Tickets just end up being a place where information and lessons die once the problem is closed out. Sometimes impossible to find an old ticket without considerable searching.
olyjohn 2y ago
I mean, have you tried to search a Facebook group, or any of the modern social media? There's not even any way to organize things, except for maybe some sticky posts. Forums were broken up into all sorts of sub-topics, and you could search them by actual keywords, and use real filters. These days the search just shows you shit that they want you to engage with, not what's actually relevant. A well moderated and curated forum is extremely easy to find information on without even searching. You're 100% right though, it's not suitable for real time communication. I wouldn't want it to be. Facebook groups have "chats" now, and it's mega impossible to keep up, and nobody actually reads them.

s_dev 2y ago

They are terrible -- there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit. The voting system is far superior to any FIFO out Pringles can of comments.

diggan 2y ago
> there is a reason you're using hacker news It's not because of the threaded comments with vanity-metrics, I can tell you that :) I've gone as far as to write my own HN client that displays HN comments as a flat list of comments, sorted by date that also folds in whatever they replied to as a proper quote, so you can follow along. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png Surely, I cannot be alone in sometimes going extreme lengths to remove this sort of pointless popularity sorting?
- 0xffff2 2y ago
  > Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png This is super cool! I don't suppose it would be easy to share?
  - diggan 2y ago
    Atm, not easy indeed, it's hacked together code that barely works as-is, with a config that would be an even bigger mystery. Best hope is that I someday feel like cleaning it up and open sourcing it, alternatively you write something simple yourself :) Sorry!
bluGill 2y ago
I use HN and reddit because they are a source of interesting third party articles on random topics that then can be discussed in depth. Forums are a source of original discussion on a given topic. Those are very different things that meet very different needs.
epolanski 2y ago
> there is a reason you're using hacker news and probably reddit It's a good place to talk stuff that's popular, but discussions fade and die quickly. Also, I still use vBulletin-like forums. Examples from the last decade I still use: mbworld.org for discussing Mercedes cars, bitcointalk, hwupgrade, overclockers.uk and some others. Reddit/Twitter absolutely cannot replace any of those I listed for long lasting specific discussions, they are just unfit.

nonethewiser 2y ago

I think the flat list of comments is strictly worse than a tree for representing a conversation. Although in other ways I do agree with your sentiment. The discussions happening there were usually of higher quality and nuance than you see online now. There are many factors to that though, including some that have nothing to do with vBulletin itself.

bluGill 2y ago
The problem with a tree is if the discussion gets long eventually several branches reach a point where someone being discussed in one is just a variation of what is being discusses in a different once and you need to bring the two back.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Yeah, there's no good/bad solution to this, albeit I would say that today an hybrid of a vBulletin-like forum with task planning capabilities (ala GH Projects, where pretty much every entity is a GH issue) with a sprinkle of AI you can ask stuff for would meet 99.9% of my needs.
- sph 2y ago
  A low-tech compromise that I find preferable to list or tree is what YouTube does, by having one-level deep trees.

numpad0 2y ago

How? I'm aware that it's the single most used forum software across the English Internet, but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use.

diggan 2y ago
> but it's extremely wasteful in screen real estate and not so intuitive to use. Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:

dfxm12 2y ago

Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't. More than considering what the "best" platform is, I wish my org would pick one thing in each category and stick with it. We don't need teams AND slack. We don't need teams AND zoom... I think that's where the real problem lies. It's harder to get comfortable with the software this way.

diggan 2y ago
> Some discussions benefit from real time communication, some don't Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving towards what you mention would be great. > I think that's where the real problem lies That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams internally", that'd be crazy. The number of times a development community I want to join is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public forum, is something I constantly encounter.
- anthk 2y ago
  Discord it's a turd. It's a silo. And, if Discord deletes a group, good luck backing up your data. Gone. Forever.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    People are pushing Discord to be something it's not. Discord is a replacement for IRC and Ventrilo/Teamspeak/Mumble. It's NOT a replacement for forums or subreddits, no matter how much people try to push it as one. Yeah, you can't easily back up all your discussions, but most people weren't doing that with IRC anyways.

bluGill 2y ago

Forums can be great, but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this". That makes it hard to follow the latest discussions. The few that do have that concept are great, search them out.

diggan 2y ago
> but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this". Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that normally works, is that you go to the last post you remember reading, then continue from there. So start at last page, go back until you remember what you're coming across, continue reading from there. Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though, the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.
olyjohn 2y ago
Every time I logged into a forum, it would highlight all the unread posts. The latest post pushed the thread to the top. I'm not sure what forums you used that weren't like that. PHPBB and vBulletin both did that by default.
Meekro 2y ago
I used (and ran) phpBB-based forums back in 2007, and even then it would tell you which threads have new posts for you to see.