11–20 of 203 posts
I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess). Maybe they will make a comeback?
I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess). Maybe they will make a comeback?
The few forums that I still use seem to run vBulletin or Invision (both PHP bulletin boards but both paid software).
I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess). Maybe they will make a comeback?
Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.
Forum software of phpBB's era got so many things right that we get wrong today. I'm glad it's still chugging along. It's valuable software, even if that value is contained to small islands outside of the continents that are the mega-platforms of social media.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drupal is up there, maybe not as a household name like WordPress, but in some big organizations.
Drupal's been on the heavy decline over the past 10 years. Drupal 8/9/10 might turn it around now that Drupal 7 is set to officially retire eventually but it's not had the staying power in the way Wordpress has. Drupal doesn't really seem to have an ecosystem left anymore.
Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never…
The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and where the writing style recognized this, often having single posts that more closely resemble articles.
Twitter and Mastodon seem a lot more ephemeral. As do sites like this or reddit, after all, they're concerned with "news".
StackOverflow seems closer to the forums of olden time out of most of the contemporary outlets.
So apart from the UI, you might miss that different conversational character resulting out of this.
As a final note, I do miss Wikis like the original one, where you had a lot of long-standing information, but with a conversational bent.
I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess). Maybe they will make a comeback?
Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.
Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never…
One definining characteristic of internet media is where they rank on the "transience" spectrum. The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and…
Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never…
Forums felt like writing emails in the open.
Twitter felt like texting in the open.
Not sure what the next thing will be! I say this as someone with 1k+ posts on multiple forums (essentially archived at this point).