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Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

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Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#32
post #26

Congrats this looks really cool! As someone who grew up in the heyday of these message boards, I appreciate the throwback. I also like the sports board title (though, technically, it should be "we like sportz ").

dang good call!! updated!!!

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#33
post #11

Early 2000s message boards were so much fun. vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up. Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.

Twitter has way less moderation than probably any Vbulletin site. The key is not tripping the algos. But otherwise, you can get away with a lot. There is no such thing as a 'twitter admin' or 'dm the mods' like there is with a regular forum.

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hilariously awful moderation I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war

Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.

Social media owners wanted all the benefits of superscale communities with none of the responsibilities - it isn't surprising that moderation got worse.

Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#36
The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO.

The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo.

Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#37

Cool, is source available? I didn't see it.

not yet, but definitely in the future!

We would love to see the source code for this also. Would be very nostalgic to self-host an instance for personal use.

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#38
post #36

The forum at forum.hardware.fr was for most of its main mature code parts written between 2000 and 2001. It has not upgraded revision since about 2010. It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023. Way better thread handling than reddit IMHO. The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful fren…

Another one is https://www.guitariste.com/forums/ since 2000!

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#39
post #11

Early 2000s message boards were so much fun. vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up. Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.

> hilariously awful moderation

> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)

> Thread locked: use the search function next time

followed by...

> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)

> Thread locked: don't necropost

:^)

Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum

#40
post #16

After reddit implodes, I vote that we bring back forums and/or BBS's

Why wait? AWS and DigitalOcean are dirt cheap. Go set something up and have fun. A number of communities have already forked from Reddit and seem to be doing just fine. As long as you have something interesting to talk about then people will come.

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