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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

#181

Post by Lolaccount »

Pilottwave wrote: post #175

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

I cannot tell you how much I disagree.

I want rank by reply-date. That, in itself, is (and was) a measure of popularity.

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

#182

Post by sunaurus »

julianlam wrote: post #146

As the maintainer of a self-proclaimed "modern" forum software, I always get really excited when new board software comes out. You've probably discovered that building forum software is a lot more complicated than it looks. Those early boards really had a lot more going on under the hood than you thought! It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wis…

> It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wise.

This is really interesting to me, because I created an "old" style forum from scratch for a gaming community about a decade ago, and it only took me a month or two to build.

I built it with Python and Angularjs. I think I had pretty much all the typical features: subforums, threads, posts, user profiles, signatures, full moderation tools, etc.

I'm actually genuinely curious about what I did differently from you. Do you have any blog posts or anything like that going into more detail about the hidden complexities that you guys dealt with under the hood?

Edit: Aha, I found your product through your profile and had a quick look. I guess it probably just comes down to amount features - you guys have a LOT more stuff going on that just a typical old forum did.

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

#183

Post by yywwbbn »

Lolaccount wrote: post #181
Pilottwave wrote: post #175

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

I cannot tell you how much I disagree. I want rank by reply-date. That, in itself, is (and was) a measure of popularity.

If you have <= 100 people actively posting on the forum than yes.

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

#184

Post by Pilottwave »

Lolaccount wrote: post #181
Pilottwave wrote: post #175

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

I cannot tell you how much I disagree. I want rank by reply-date. That, in itself, is (and was) a measure of popularity.

Reddit supports rank by reply date. Which i often use, because it can be useful. My argument is that in most cases its not the most useful ranking option.

I can also remind the old forum rules like: "No useless posts. This includes: Necroing, Thread bumping, useless one liners, Flamewars, Trolling and Spamming."

The above is no longer an issue in the more modern forum ranking methods in combination with nesting. Its frankly just sub-par any way you slice it, since the new ways have the features of the old and add to it. There is no regression only progress, you could argue.

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

#185

Post by euoia »

teolandon wrote: post #134

I haven't been this excited to jump in and post in a community in a while. There's just something so inviting in commenting on a thread knowing that your post will be there, in order, and won't be lost in the noise even if you didn't show up early. I had a whole post written out on a thread, but apparently I need to wait for approval. Bit of a bummer but we'll see how long that takes. Good luck!

Same. It would have been nice to know that I need approval before writing out my post.

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

#186

Post by timeon »

Pilottwave wrote: post #175

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

Some Czech and Slovak [0] forums of early 2000 had (and still have) this feature as separate page with posts / comments ordered by 'karma'.

[0] nyx.cz kyberia.sk ...

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

#187

Post by Ntrails »

sunaurus wrote: post #182
julianlam wrote: post #146

As the maintainer of a self-proclaimed "modern" forum software, I always get really excited when new board software comes out. You've probably discovered that building forum software is a lot more complicated than it looks. Those early boards really had a lot more going on under the hood than you thought! It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wis…

> It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wise. This is really interesting to me, because I created an "old" style forum from scratch for a gaming community about a decade ago, and it only took me a month or two to build. I built it with Python and Angularjs. I think I had pretty much all the typical features: subforums, threads, posts, user profil…

[flagged]

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

#188

Post by eXpl0it3r »

I wish there were more "modern" old school forum software alternatives, which you can still just throw onto any LAMP stack hosting provider. I think the closest thing I've found is Flarum.

I'm predicting that in a decade or two, we'll start to notice, that there's a huge gap in retained information, because so many online interactions moved into closed systems, such as social media pages or Discord servers, which aren't well or at all indexed and we might have permanently lost some platforms along the way.

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

#189

Post by dgb23 »

Pilottwave wrote: post #175

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

I personally got in contact with nested / tree structured forums before the flat, chronological ones. I remember a discussion around 2000 where the flat model got traction. There are up and downsides to each.

Of course this is a pure display issue, there’s no reason one couldn’t switch between both in the same forum.

However there’s something about seeing the same thing others see and interacting with that context in mind.

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

#190

Post by newaccount74 »

Pilottwave wrote: post #175

It looks great. However browsing this forum reminds my of the biggest innovation since these days. The reddit/HN like front page going across multiple subjects, ranked not by reply date, but by popularity. Combined with a nested comment system, ranked by popularity. For 99% of topics this is the most efficient way to browse and discover. Hence i feel that, besides nostalgia and very small communities (where you "know…

The popularity ranking suffers from a few problems.

One problem is that the 1% most popular comments get dozens/hundreds of replies, and no-one responds or even looks at the bottom 90% of comments.

The most popular posts and comments are usually very strong, divisive statements. If you don't have a strong opinion, noone will upvote you, and it will seem that everyone is either strongly for or against something.

Then there's the problem that time is a strong factor in the rankings, which means that there is rarely any long-term followup.

In old forums, there used to be threads that went on for years. Long term follow-up is close to non-existant on HN and Reddit.

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