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PhpBB 3.3.10

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Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#61

Post by saltylicorice »

jdwithit wrote: post #37
lolinder wrote: post #9

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…

As a fellow internet old timer, I agree that social media never really hooked me. I still spend vastly more time reading and posting on the SomethingAwful forums, which have been going for more than 20 years at this point, than I do Twitter. Maybe it's just "old man yells at cloud" and me refusing to change with the times, but I just strongly prefer the dynamics of forums. Forums are also great for niche interests an…

I spent so many years on SA and Homebrewtalk and they were both such rich communities. Discord is nice and all (and seems to be where things are going) but there's something overwhelming about chat that was really cozy about forums.

(everything2 was incredible back when it was active and I really wish there was something like that again too)

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#62

Post by dankwizard »

BizarreByte wrote: post #38

I used to despise PhpBB, at the time I thought it was vastly inferior to SMF. SMF seemed far more professional, the closest you could get to vbulletin while being free. In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while. The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.

I'm not familiar with SMF but screenshots give me InvisionFree vibes. All my favourite forums were all on InvisionFree. Is this the same thing?

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#63

Post by oefrha »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #40
lolinder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forums felt like writing emails in the open. Actually, most of my favorite forums were only accessible if you registered, which in several cases required an invite. So it was less like writing letters in the open and much more like getting together with my bowling buddies or whatever. Just a group of friends who you hang out with from time to time.

Interesting! I usually see forums with hidden sections for long-time members, whether that was by registration time, post count, or manual addition. TIGForums has a fun forum section you can actually see with 0 posts (registered) and then again at a much higher post count. It vanishes as soon you do you first post. I more meant "email" for content length, at least with my personal experience--forum posts were more li…

It depends on the forum. I used to chat on a fully public forum with a few friends (whom I never met outside the forum) back in the 2000s. A couple hundred posts a night was typical, each post on par with or even shorter than a typical tweet. We never moved to an IM for some reason.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#64

Post by prox »

nonethewiser wrote: post #44
mhd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thread on HN the other day about wanting to revive old threads made me realize how transient posts are. The difference is basically that comments in threads are not linear by time and threads are not sorted by most recent comment. Free app idea.

Call me crazy but aren’t you describing a forum?

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#65

Post by losteric »

JamesAdir wrote: post #56
jdwithit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow internet old timer, I agree that social media never really hooked me. I still spend vastly more time reading and posting on the SomethingAwful forums, which have been going for more than 20 years at this point, than I do Twitter. Maybe it's just "old man yells at cloud" and me refusing to change with the times, but I just strongly prefer the dynamics of forums. Forums are also great for niche interests an…

Algorithmic feed + moderators. This is what makes FB, twitter such horrible places for building a real community. Each thread in a FB group is valued but it's ability to create more traffic and more ads and not because of it's true value to the community. The result is that what comes in your feed is usually the feeds that generate extreme reactions from different sides. On forums if it's up you know it's a real disc…

I wonder if anyone has experimented with algorithms optimized for sustainable long-term community building. What would that even look like?

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#66

Post by pancrufty »

muglug wrote: post #28
chippiewill wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sites like Wix and Squarespace really undermined Drupal and other similar OSS offerings. There are still things you can only do with a custom sytem, but for most use-cases commercial site-design tools can get you up and running with much less upfront cost. I designed & built about 20 websites from 2007 to 2014 or so, all with custom designs and backed by an off-the-shelf CMS. Except for the few I maintain for close f…

As someone with similar history as yours but with WordPress, while I appreciate a well-designed website, I think custom websites are a gigantic waste of human resources. Very few need a custom Magento, WooCommerce, or even just a generic WordPress.org install. Every website is much safer with a PaaS, and I believe prices for these will eventually come down.

Just think that before WordPress people were coding a whole website from scratch for the local photographer or news agency, with often sub-optimal and/or overpriced results.

> a whole bunch of sites look much more generic.

True, but that's just a consequence of letting the customer deal with it directly rather than a professional. Most PaaS still allow custom designs, nobody is stopping you from adding a Flash intro page.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#67

Post by tommica »

saltylicorice wrote: post #61
jdwithit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow internet old timer, I agree that social media never really hooked me. I still spend vastly more time reading and posting on the SomethingAwful forums, which have been going for more than 20 years at this point, than I do Twitter. Maybe it's just "old man yells at cloud" and me refusing to change with the times, but I just strongly prefer the dynamics of forums. Forums are also great for niche interests an…

I spent so many years on SA and Homebrewtalk and they were both such rich communities. Discord is nice and all (and seems to be where things are going) but there's something overwhelming about chat that was really cozy about forums. (everything2 was incredible back when it was active and I really wish there was something like that again too)

Problem with discord is that it is still just a chat, with forums a newbie has a lot of threads to go through, lots of specific content to consume.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#68

Post by nvr219 »

masenf wrote: post #43

In the last month, I’ve been experimentally replacing my use of Trello, stickies, and todo lists with a phpBB instance. So far I’m the only user, but it’s a surprisingly nice system for keeping track of notes and regular status updates on my projects. And when I need to collaborate with someone, the permission system is quite nice as well. The fact that it’s free, mature, and relatively easy to install and maintain a…

I love this post thank you

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#69

Post by nigamanth »

javchz wrote: post #35
lockhouse wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is still one of the fastest ways to not only program a quick and dirty web app, but more importantly deploy a web app.

I think people who hate PHP, forgot how painful it was to develop server side apps before PHP. I think one of the greatest legacy of PHP was brining "Serverless" hosting to the masses, where you only focus on the "upload" of the code, and you didn't need an ISS or Linux expert to deploy your projects. Yeah, PHP had a weird teenage phase, but even JS and Python still have a lot of weird things too (specially JS). But…

Rails is gone, aside from a few use cases there is always a better alternative.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#70

Post by loeber »

dankwizard wrote: post #62
BizarreByte wrote: post #38

I used to despise PhpBB, at the time I thought it was vastly inferior to SMF. SMF seemed far more professional, the closest you could get to vbulletin while being free. In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while. The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.

I'm not familiar with SMF but screenshots give me InvisionFree vibes. All my favourite forums were all on InvisionFree. Is this the same thing?

SMF means Simple Machines Forum, which is a FOSS project. InvisionFree was a for-profit company. I don't know if InvisionFree ran on SMF.
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