Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by iafiaf » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 1:34 AM UTC

blueridge wrote: post #46

Anyone play World of Warcraft back in the day? Remember Elitist Jerks, their forum? Great place for solid gameplay discussion. And the general social threads in the Benefactors Bar were excellent. They had strict writing rules and moderators enforced the use of good grammar and complete sentences. https://web.archive.org/web/20080913011707/http://elitistjer... https://web.archive.org/web/20080921165026/http://elitist…

Didn't think I'd see EJ mentioned here. I distinctly recall planning and reading raiding strategies in there fur hours. I think there largest Onyxia thread was started by me. Glorious times.

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

#92

Post by nonethewiser » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 1:42 AM UTC

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #30

carabiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing is the chronological ordering and lack of karma ordering leads to more freewheeling, breezy conversations. People aren't ego posting as much and are more liberal with speaking their minds, even if their views are unpopular. There are less flamewars, though you also miss out on some deeper discussions. This is also why I like Blind so much, where anonymity has caused it to be the best source of advice o…

Additionally, topics being sorted by "what post received a comment most recently" meant that high-quality threads stayed near the top for a long time, leading to much better discoverability. When I want to learn a lot about some obscure hobby, a dedicated forum is an extremely good place to go. Read the top 5-10 threads in most of the categories, and you've got a fantastic jumping off point.

This is a major difference. Reddit, Hackernews, and others are more "24 hour news cycle". Built to churn out new and bury old.

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

#93

Post by nonethewiser » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 1:50 AM UTC

Felger wrote: 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 It has a quite outdated but efficient look and UI even in 2023.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…

I love the UI but making each comment an HTML table is making me very uncomfortable.

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

#94

Post by krapp » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 1:52 AM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #93

Felger wrote: 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…

I love the UI but making each comment an HTML table is making me very uncomfortable.

You may not want to view source on HN then.

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

#95

Post by Ocha » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 1:54 AM UTC

There are real forums from early 2000 running on early 2000 code. Check out https://forum.ge/

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

#96

Post by edwinyzh » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 1:58 AM UTC

Well done! The forum feels very nice to the eyes!

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

#97

Post by krapp » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 1:59 AM UTC

Ocha wrote: post #95

There are real forums from early 2000 running on early 2000 code. Check out https://forum.ge/

Matt's Script Archive is still around[0]. There are even some WWWBoards still in the wild too.

http://www.scriptarchive.com/

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

#98

Post by vouaobrasil » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 2:00 AM UTC

ddejohn wrote: post #62

bombcar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums are so much better for threaded conversations than anything else it’s amazing. All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.

I actually don't like how forums deal with threaded conversations (at least in the forums I still use). I do like being able to quote and multi-quote, but I also like being able to collapse comment trees and only read top-level comments as my default reading flow. I only dig into comment trees when I'm interested in the discussion. Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and on…

Check out DPreview.com. They have threaded view done right. It's much better than this forum for threads because you can see a hierarchical index of all posts, whereas popular threads here only have the first thread easily visible if it's really long and by the time the discussion gets into past depth 3 it's usually quite boring here.

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

#99

Post by anyfoo » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 2:07 AM UTC

BFLpL0QNek wrote: post #86

Nice 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 Vbulle…

They seem to make a comeback of sorts. I know a few podcasts at least that have gathered their community in "old school" web forums. Some of them literally use the old phpBB, but some use much more modern and mature software, that is a pleasure to use.

They all however still adhere to the linear (non-tree) thread model. You can answer to individual posts and they are then linked together, but all posts still appear in chronological order under the thread.

It really works, and feels much more like a community, like it did in the old days. There are also some really long-lived threads, things don't age out quickly as they do on reddit and HN. Threads are ranked by recent activity, not by upvotes.

I don't know why they make a comeback. Maybe a combination of the realization that the old forums just worked better for community building, and Facebook (which I think was indeed a large driver of the "forum death" of the 2010s) fading.

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

#100

Post by noduerme » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 2:08 AM UTC

BFLpL0QNek wrote: post #86

Nice 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 Vbulle…

There are still some quality 90s-style automotive forums around, and many take donations. A steel guitar forum I'm on charges a nominal $5/year. Reddit may have breadth of scale, but these have depth and expertise that makes it worth keeping them going.