I had this random idea where I could start a new forum like this, but make it appear popular by seeding it with hundreds of users who are just ChatGPT. Wouldn't be surprised if this is already being done by some sites. Dead Internet Theory is real.
Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
81–90 of 245 posts
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#82Can I just say that you've done a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of old school forums without going overboard into old school UI/UX? The spacing, font choices and just general layout feel modern enough without being overbearing. It's very pleasant to browse.
It's odd because I was immediately thrown off when I hit the back button and there was a lag going back. Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way. It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must…
yeah looks like the lag got a little bad the past couple hours because i wasn't ready for the traffic. i'm going to looking into upgrading the hardware tonight. i was not ready for this HN post doing as well as it did.
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#83Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#84https://bitcointalk.org/ is still running SMF (created in 2006) and looks pretty old school.
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#85It loads a huge chunk of obfuscated javascript buildshared something something. I thought that was more recent than early 2000s. Also it loads fonts from google. It all seems way too modern. The main forum I remember using in that era was Webcrossing, which was more like Hacker News in being mostly text, though (my preference) not threaded. Usenet was also still going strong back then.
Added: it is quite hard to use with lynx. I think it is best to not depend on much layout from the browser. I used WebX with lynx all the time and it was fine. Not saying this is a bad forum in general terms, but I think if it is aiming for retro appeal, it doesn't go far enough.
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#86Nice design.
I miss the 2000s forums. They were a great source of information that was easy to read, search and for search engines to index. As the posts where often by enthusiasts they were a treasure trove, especially the automotive forums for repair information. The closest we have now is Reddit but doesn’t feel the same and the UX certainly isn’t as good even comparing to 2000s hobbyists installing vanilla Vbulletin and tweaking colours and a few plugins.
A lot of the forums I visited that died, died because success made hosting to expensive as the only option was vertical scaling the database and hard to moneytorise, then things like private Facebook groups took away the various cliques.
I often wondered if I could create a horizontal scalable forum to make hosting costs trivial. Topics are a natural partition key and old posts are heavily cacheable with only recent posts needing lower cache ttls. I think the deployment complexity would be too much for hobbyist though.
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got it. I found out after reading the rest of the thread. Hope you can figure out the culprit, or he’ll just forget about it after a day. May be worth showing that message on the registration page right from the start if/when registrations are turned off.
or just hand out invites to people on hn who have an email listed.
i just deployed a "account_enabled" feature so i'll manually approve new accounts coming in to post, but in the meantime you can make your account again
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#88The (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) is chef's kiss
:10bux:
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#89People think I am insane but I often think forums would be way better than Slack or Teams for company collaboration.
We had an amazing internal 'social media' site at VMware that was basically used like an old-school forum (Socialcast), but then the legal department nuked everything older than ~1 year old, obliterating a huge and beneficial source of org knowledge and more or less ruining the use case (you usually could find an answer for anything you needed, or figure out who to talk to about it if not).
VMware acquired the software company that created the software, failed to market it, and it's only extant as a shadow of itself internally.
Re: Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
#90It loads a huge chunk of obfuscated javascript buildshared something something. I thought that was more recent than early 2000s. Also it loads fonts from google. It all seems way too modern. The main forum I remember using in that era was Webcrossing, which was more like Hacker News in being mostly text, though (my preference) not threaded. Usenet was also still going strong back then. Added: it is quite hard to use…
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