alt Hacker NewsBring back crappy forums
Comments
This remind me of collegue life while enjoying on some Linux forums, good old days
I always feel lost in social media those days, especially when X got bought by Elon Musk and premium users start to generate CONTENT(*) to get traffic and revenue
Forums is just for some hobbist and it have didived content by channels(I almost forget what's the name) and have some highlight posts upvoted by users, that's really good stuffs
How we get to this state I do not know, but a clear signal is that my classmate those days works on a startup that build app for forums by using some forum's API or customized solution, but seems mobile App goes fast and they lost the track, so perhaps forum get lost with emerge of Apps and user just stick to Apps and social media is also sort of Apps people get sticked(Addicted) to
I have flirted with the idea of returning to Slashdot, as I have noticed a few examples of suspect conflict-of-interest moderation occurring here on HN, given its y-combinator hosting; particularly with respect to posts related to prediction markets.
2 of the best from my high school days are still around, though I barely even lurk anymore.
we need a new moderation system
Im so glad we in Elixir have elixirforum which (does not look crappy) is a traditional forum and feels like the internet 15 years ago.
I miss the days when HTML injection bugs were considered a feature.
The Internet was a lot more innocent before normies and money got involved.
Bring back server side rendering that just farking worked. Loud sigh every time you visit yet another broken Javascriptastic fucking website.
Looking at you:
* statefarm.com
* tmobile.com
Quality vs. Quantity.
The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.
This post is timely, considering reddit is going to start requiring login for old.reddit.com which they announced in the past few days
This made me realize that forums existed only because there was somebody willing to pay for domain, hosting and maintenance with money and time. As a result most had a bus factor of 1. All the forums I know died with their maintainer moving on - and even forums "resurrected" by a community member had that exact problem. There is space for a fully distributed forum that can't die with its maintainer.
i feel same good forum sensations on gemini BBS :) gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/
some software can federate with lemmy these days, it's like the best of both worlds.
As someone who worked as forum member and even hosted his own very successful forum during the 2000-2015 years - it is so much work in a one sided system.
It is a one to many relationship, where success in terms of forum quality and loyal members and member count are one thing, one bad apple another.
Moderation and administration looks easy on the outside but the regular members don't see the amount of invisible staff forums, that mods and admins use to handle and balance day to day happiness or survivorship - administrators always do it wrong, all blame no thank you.
I love and like forums and strictly stick to forum culture. If you can be polarizing here and there, like HN, I use it from time to time in polarizing topics. Strict rule: no flame wars, never. Most of the time I get support, which is ok, I don't troll.
Most of the time I try to find common ground and add a story or information to a comment.
Upvotes and downvotes show you the way.
So maybe it sounds pathetic but a big shoutout to the mods here and all the die hard members who keep HN the best place in my opinion there is. Never change, and I mean it.
Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.
The bodybuilding.com misc forum was recently reincarnated. That was like my childhood man, legendary posts were forged on that platform.
https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
I wonder where people used to forums stand on Lemmy
I miss nntp newsgroups :)
Internet is now past 6 billion people. What % do you think know what a forum is? What % of television users know what a transistor is or even an antenna? What % of phone users know what a dial tone is or a party line? As time marches on people use technology differently. There is no going back. The users do not get to decide what they are going to use, that is for the producers to tell us. Bring on the new color TV I'm ready to be jacked in. Industry leads the way.
Reddit killed the forum, but unfortunately gave whoever each random moderator exists absolute power to block anyone they wish. This has led to major city subreddits like r/Seattle and every other city in my state of Washington to be run by the same far left nut jobs who block any content makers they disagree with.
I actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise.
It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)
The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.
It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.
Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.
The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.
Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).
I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)
Forums are still a thing, just not as much as they used to be. Back in the late 90s to around 2012, I was a big participant in Harmony Central (musician forum centered around guitar), GearSlutz (now Gearspace), and KVR Audio. The latter two are still thriving and I'm sure HC would be as well if it weren't for a horrible "redesign" that drove all of the core users away.
Crap is literal. Many forums got taken over by people pushing products and services. The closest thing to the general topical discussions in BBSes and forums of old today are disparate social media rabbit holes gathering places. However, niche forums that just don’t have big audiences are still great; you just need to want to discuss something almost no one else cares about.
Um... is not this place right here one of these crappy forums??
I still don't know why forums died. But, on a personal note, I also find it very tedious to register for a forum and then also use it. I accumulated more and more such log-in points and at some point I did not want to register for any more, as managing that became more and more of a hassle. I still use different webforums but I also dislike having to remember any log in, and I am also not using mega-sign-in options either such as "log in via google". Using such a system only makes Google more powerful, and then more evil and more greedy and I actually want to see Google removed totally rather than give it any more power. There has to be some kind of alternative.
Discord is not, that's another private entity. I see how discord killed communities too.
I still use them. Just been on one.
poster must not have heard of letsrun.com
Reddit, Quora, Twitter, Pinterest won.
Now facebook is trying to build a new app.
What are the open source, easily hostable forum platforms available in 2026? I remember I looked at the oss web-based self hosted chat platforms not long ago and I found they were all either abandoned or had crippling limitations if you didn't pay for the closed version. I wonder if that's the same for forums.
The major reason social media won out is they treated themselves as a proper business that made scale plays. What forums obsessed over the user onboarding process? What forums obsessed over marketing and user acquisition? What forums were tracking user churn and how to prevent it? What forums responded to the user demand for mobile apps?
The issue is that these sites primarily were ran by people who wanted to build a community as opposed to wanting to build a forum platform. So really social media were actually competing against the forum companies and forums companies failed to modernize and failed to compete against social media ability to recommend new communities to users.
Making a fuss over nothing.
This is the most rose tinted thing I've ever seen. phpBB rightly has a reputation for being awful.
In fairness it is possible to do old-school forums well, but the only example I have ever seen is the D language forum.
It's super fast, no signatures taking up 80% of the page. It does still have the "page 1 or 423" problem but I guess that wouldn't be too hard to fix. Apparently it even can be accessed via usenet clients.
But please don't glorify awful phpBB shit.
Great article. I think the problem though is that people changed, fundamentally.
In the day of the crappy forum, people actually cared about interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, community. You could join a forum and after a few months, the community would embrace you as one of their own and remember your username. Each user would have their own personality and they would bring a certain quality; humour, creativity, experience, wisdom, intellect... to discussions.
Now with social media, you're just a consumer. If you share something, it feels like nobody sees your comment and nobody cares. If you don't have a lot of money and aren't famous, nobody cares what you have to say. No matter how interesting your life and career has been, your unique personality, humour, intellect, experiences; they're all worthless now.
Social media became popular because people changed. Or at least, the average person online changed... But look at me, I'm using social media too and I don't go on forums anymore; clearly even I changed.
Now only money matters and nothing else. Every person is judged purely through the lens of how much money they have and how much others approve of them. Intrinsic qualities have lost all their value.
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work.
And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die.
That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it.
They are called Reddit or Discord these days.
And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord.
I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.
I think the nostalgia here is misplaced. No one took the forums from us. They're still around. They're just not fun to use unless you're already invested in the community and its lore. And truth to be told, I don't want to become a part of the furnace enthusiasts community, set up an account, read ten pages of rules, and then get chastised by a moderator for posting in the wrong sub-forum just because I have a furnace maintenance question.
I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.
I think they lost something too.
I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it.
The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok.
The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.
https://flipso.com does chronological + up/down voting but without nested comments.