171–180 of 203 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a job for archive.org
That doesn't solve the issue of the millions of embeds and links though.
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…
On the other hand, administrating even a moderately sized forum (or a mailing list) was a shitshow in itself. You'd deal with constant attempts of people trying to 0wn your server, to DDoS it, or to spam - and phpBB being a constant exploit source didn't help either. And then on top of that you'd have to deal with people attempting to use your server for illicit stuff - CSAM, warez, porn, you name it someone tried to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Discord is attempting to have something more like forums[1], but as am not a heavy Discord user I haven't tried it myself. I used to run a phpBB forum and there was something about being an admin of a forum where people you didn't know in real life came to talk. The fact that Discord distorts the term 'server' to mean 'a channel managed by us' irks me. 1 - https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t know about algorithms, but HN does a good job of being a forum. I think it’s a combination of sensible guidelines, restricted community moderation (votes and flags) and very good manual moderation.
HN is decent for discussion about news but is not great for any longer-running discussions - probably intentionally.
I don't know the typical lifecycle of homebrew equipment, but a similar bell curve distribution should apply.
Very different timeline from discussing news and/or random gossip where nobody will care about that particular conversation a week later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be - at least the communities I used to participate in seem to use Discord now.
I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on. Having said that in many contexts a f…
That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's a mistake to equate all services that are built on top of ActivityPub to "social media" based on what Mastodon offers. There's nothing stopping a forum like service appearing that offers federation. ActivityPub *should* (though nobody currently does, as far as I know) solve the problem of requiring a new identity for each service that you want to interact with. Ideally in a federated network you only nee…
I guess I'm the opposite: I view each community I interact with as distinct, and I don't particularly want to combine them into one account. It's like real life: I might really enjoy hanging out with my in-laws and also love my D&D group, but I don't want to introduce them to each other and I show each of them slightly different facets of my personality. I don't mind having multiple accounts if that's what it takes t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.
Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion. 1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that…
The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back.
* https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on. Having said that in many contexts a f…
My number one issue with most of those forum "successors" is that everything is hidden behind a registration wall. That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.
I don't really like Discord, so I don't use it, and have no feedback on it.
I used to run a SimpleMachines forum, and we actually wanted to prevent the contents from being indexed.
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 wonder if vbulletin is still a superior product, or if the free products have caught up over the years, as forums lost popularity.
So if you're after the 'best' forum solution now, your best bet is definitely not vBulletin anymore.
I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.
All these names I haven't heard muttered in years. What about vBulletin? Conforums?