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Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

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Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#31

Post by com2kid »

make_me_rich wrote: post #6
tiffanyh wrote: post #2

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh EDITED: *conversations

I miss the good old days of BBSes, the late 90s were a serious step back in forum usability.

Until JS came along, reading online forums on a broadband internet connection was a worse user experience than using BBS forum software on a dial up modem.

Every single action, full page reload. And until cloud computing came along, even the best of website forums had servers that took forever to respond.

Somehow a BBS written for a 386 16mhz in 1992 was faster than a forum written in 1999 or even 2005. Oh wait, the 1992 forum was likely written in C, or even assembly! (And it only had 1 user at a time, that helped!)

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#33

Post by com2kid »

veidr wrote: post #23
have_faith wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if each "collapse" link reloads the page and at the same time stores the preference in the backend against your username so that subsequent page loads know what to hide (:

LOL you are so right... so much was lost when we started accepting that page reloads are expensive (T_T)

For 20 years page reloads were expensive.

In 1999 I had a cable modem connection that could pull down 2 megabytes per second and ping up and down the west cost well under 50ms.

But forum servers were slow. Like, really really slow. When Sites like Reddit finally came to, 15 or so years later, with inline replies, they were a breath of fresh air.

Back in 99 Slashdot had massive resources put into making it responsive, lots of servers thrown at it, and it was still laggy and slow compared to Reddit now days.

Everyone arguing about "time to first draw being under 100ms" forgets that just a short time ago, web servers took more than 100ms to respond to a connection.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#34

Post by cygx »

make_me_rich wrote: post #6
tiffanyh wrote: post #2

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh EDITED: *conversations

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions are "threaded" stupidly hard to read.

A 'classical' web forum is threaded, contrasting with an unthreaded (bulletin) board - at least that's how the terminology was used in the German webdev scene of the late 90s/early 2000s, possibly due to the prominence of SELFHTML and its forum.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#35

Post by tiffanyh »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #18
tiffanyh wrote: post #2

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at! With modern forums, it’s mostly the UX that sucks. PWAs that never recover from errors, endless scrolling, stuff like that. Also * Falsehoods forum developers believe about network reliability – did you know the network can be down? Then up again? * Falsehoods forum developers believe about time – did you know that time can jump forward, by huge amounts, because the pa…

> I actually believe vBulletin 3 is where it’s at!

Curious, what about vBulletin v4 and v5 do you not like?

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#36

Post by INTPenis »

tiffanyh wrote: post #2

I commend you for hand rolling it all and not using JS. I miss the days of good ole forum software (e.g. FluxBB/PunBB) before it was superseded with massive JS bloat/clunky forum software like Discourse, Flarum, etc.

I loved PunBB. 18 years ago at my first IT job I actually stole PunBBs design to make the control panel for our web hosting company. Nobody knew because even then punbb was kinda esoteric.

Re: Show HN: Minimal, no-JS web forum software

#37

Post by mostlysimilar »

dmitriid wrote: post #20
make_me_rich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ohh I miss the good old days of forums in general. I find all this new software, where conversions* are "threaded" stupidly hard to read. Even worse, when the software is trying to recommend to you, what to read. Back in the day you had a thread, every post to that thread was chronologically added to that thread and in case you wanted to reply to someone, you quoted them... sigh EDITED: *conversations

Threaded conversations are really good because you can have branching discussions that don't interfere with each other. But the only forum I know of that realised how to properly do it is this old Russian software forum [1] You need a mail client-like interface so that you can see your place in the discussion. Triple quoting someone and trying to read the actual thread in a flat forum sucked then and sucks now. [1] E…

vBulletin 3.x/4.x and IPB 2.x/3.x had threaded view as an option alongside flat.

Forum software of old actually gave users the power to choose the interface they want. We've really gone backwards with software interfaces.

Also, themes. These days all we get are "Dark Mode" and "Light Mode". Boring.

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