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I don’t like the flat style comments of sites like PhpBB. Is there an equivalent open source solution that does reddit style hierarchical comments?
HackerNews? It was never fully open sourced but there are older versions: http://arclanguage.org/install
[1a] - https://postmill.xyz/
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The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum. So much so that pretty much everyone has resorted to copying it over the last 15 years. There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.
Nested replies are definitely better as a way of consuming a post and its comments once and then never thinking about it again. For an asynchronous discussion between several people they get unwieldy after a few rounds of replying. They also make it harder to coherently reference points made cross-tree. That plus algorithmic ranking gives a constant feeling of "gotta refresh to see if there's new stuff" that serves a…
It might surprise you that, I think 4chan explores mixed threading like no other website does. Threads are linear, but quoting results in backlinks meaning isolated conversations are easily navigable, filtering out the "firehose". There's also a button that looks like [-] that can hide a post and all its nested replies, this can hide a specific reply chain from the linear view of the thread. I gave the system a bigger eulogy over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33567593
Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have. Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.
JavaScript back then was a total obscurity - I didn't actually learn it until maybe 6 years later because, before then, everything was rendered by the server and you'd just copy DHTML snippets for silly things.
Someone approached me to help modify their phpBB forum and while I did that as a hobby for a short while, they were also the first people to pay me for it. Basically validated my work and put me on the career path I have now.
I was very into deploying and modding PhpBB when I was in middle school. I learned PHP because of it (though I didn't build any substantial mods) and how to work with RDBMSes, Unix filesystems, HTML, etc. The sites that I built never engendered much community interaction though. I was never a fan of Reddit and find traditional forums much easier to navigate. I also think that the slight friction involved in creating…
Reddit is easier to read (comment threading) and is text only, which is its unique value proposition. PhpBB forum, which I ironically use way more than Reddit these days, have almost no threading and limits to 10 posts per page with no hiding posts unless block all user posts, and ad banners everywhere. But I welcome any return to self-hosting, even though most site require membership until a user can view full scale…
I remember great, classic forum threads with 100+ pages that would get referenced, maintained, etc. It felt like being put on the same level as everyone else in sequential order was a pretty even playing field. It also gave you the ability to summarize and respond to a few different comments at once instead of having to navigate multiple content threads.
That said, I don't know if forum discussions would work for r/funny posts at that scale. It's literally a consistent 10K comments, all junk pretty much. The number of pages would blow up constantly, and it would definitely be harder to navigate the reactions.
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[Tildes]( https://tildes.net ) is open source and does something like that. Not a direct 1:1 to phpBB but more like a cross between old school forums and reddit.
Tildes is a popular-kids-club-invite-only thing and therefore not a replacement for phpBB or Reddit. (Before you say it's open source and you should just run your own copy—they provide no instructions for setting up your own instance. It's apparently not meant to be used by anyone else.)
On the other hand, I'm actually too cool for tildes.
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If a bunch of independent traditional forums was such a compelling experience, you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them. The hay day of even large forums like Neogaf and SomethingAwful has also passed. The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subre…
One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today. I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays. Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.
Just think of what it takes to get a new forum going: purchasing a domain name, setting up hosting, installing the forum software, setting up the aforementioned authentication APIs, dealing with SEO so people can actually find your site on Google (that one seems almost impossible now). It's absolutely dizzying. At least something like Lemmy solves all of this for you, bringing you back to a Reddit-like level of effort.
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It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc. Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and…
See, this is one of many reasons why I'm sad we still use usernames/passwords for so many sites. I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.
Quite a few big sites like Yahoo, Google, AOL Verisign would provide a URL you could login with (they were identity providers) and there were lots of independent providers too. You could easily host your own with as simple PHP script.
Sadly, fewer large sites would actually accept OpenID as a way of logging in, but you could used OpenID for authenticating Blogger comments. Stackexchange supported OpenID logins for 8 years [until July 2018](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307647/support-for-...).
The BBC wrote quite a good summary of how things stood in 2008: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/openid_found...
It's another one of those sad parts of the web we lost.
Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have. Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.
Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble. Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none…
A forum is made of long-lasting discussions, spanning months or years. You login and you see whether there's new messages in the discussions you have been part of.
Reddit/Hackernews promotes a very different style of short lived (1/2 days at most discussion).
There's just no way a subreddit out there can replace what I get out of [1]overclockers.co.uk forum for hardware discussions (no, hardware subreddits can't even come close as an experience, you have literally discussions spanning years) or [2]mbworld for Mercedes cars.
Subreddits are toys compared to well maintained forums as source of informations.