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Bring back crappy forums

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#181

Post by pelagicAustral »

willis936 wrote: post #166
divan wrote: post #160

The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums. In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a…

Discourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.

It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...

Nothing beats vBulletin or IPV...

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#182

Post by pelagicAustral »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #173
divan wrote: post #160

The word 'crappy' stood out to me. I feel the same sentiment about bringing back forums, but as a person who maintained few of those for many years, I always wanted explicitly non-crappy forums. In fact, I attribute much of the decline of forums to the fact that they were crappy and hard to maintain. Those PHP/Ruby monstrousities, with plugin system that was a security and maintaiability nightmare, made maintaining a…

Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?

Yeah, you are absolutely right! I think this is my new weekend sesh... my brand new vBulletin...

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#184

Post by shevy-java »

I still don't know why forums died. But, on a personal note, I also find it very tedious to register for a forum and then also use it. I accumulated more and more such log-in points and at some point I did not want to register for any more, as managing that became more and more of a hassle. I still use different webforums but I also dislike having to remember any log in, and I am also not using mega-sign-in options either such as "log in via google". Using such a system only makes Google more powerful, and then more evil and more greedy and I actually want to see Google removed totally rather than give it any more power. There has to be some kind of alternative.

Discord is not, that's another private entity. I see how discord killed communities too.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#185

Post by internet_points »

Quite a lot of my searches for practical advice (building, maintenance, event planning, shopping etc. etc) have the best hits from forums that on the face of it rarely seem relevant, e.g. forums for bmx bikers or moms etc. Old-school forums with real humans sharing real experiences.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#186

Post by cjs_ac »

crimsoneer wrote: post #153
davb wrote: post #122

I used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.

Why? You are significantly more likely to be struck by lightning when out for a walk then prosecuted for running a forum under the online safety act. The act and guidance are very, very clear that your safeguards have to be proportionate to your scale and audience. If you're running a small forum, a quick "I sometimes check the posts and make sure nobody is using it to groom children or exchange child porn" is just f…

Come on mate, you can't go around implying that you've actually read the legislation. This is HN, you have to blindly trust what the free speech absolutists say about it.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#187

Post by trashb »

Sadly Discord and to a certain extent Reddit is seen as a alternative for forums now a days. I like forums because it feels like a small community sure. But also because they are ACHIEVABLE!

I can't count the amount of times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and I found it on a 7/10yo forum post.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#188

Post by throw0101a »

Findecanor wrote: post #165
postalcoder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics. What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds…

I'm on a few classic forums with threads that are over 20 years old, with a wealth of information about a topic. It is easier to revisit a thread and find new posts when posts are in chronological order. Most such forums remember the last post of your last visit, and takes you to after that position the next time you enter the thread. Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of post…

> Tree views get tedious to revisit after they have reached a critical amount of posts, especially if subtrees can shift position from up/down-clicks. So threads with no revisits don't last as long.

Tree/threaded views are an implementation detail: in e-mail clients you can toggle the threading offset view ("by converstaion"), e.g.:

* https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/mail/view-email-...

Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable on a web site?

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#189

Post by TrackerFF »

I'm still an active user in two different "crappy" old forums where the posts are shown in sequential order.

Let me tell you one thing, after having used reddit/hackernews tree-like structure for years, it is hard - extremely hard - to go back to using the older types of forums.

The problem is that they need very active moderation. It only takes two users to completely derail a thread, or clutter up everything. When you have two users that start arguing / discussing, it completely ruins the flow for everyone else. Also, jumping back and forth from page to page is annoying.

That's the logistical aspect of it.

Most older forums I used, seems to have migrated to facebook groups years ago.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#190

Post by tannhaeuser »

Having witnessed forums languishing and closing down, and attempts to open up new ones with almost nobody signing up, I wonder if the reluctance of giving away credentials is a generational thing. It seems Lemmy-style/Piefed Reddit Fediverse alternatives are faring slightly better, not universally but at least for some topics and media-affine folks, though maybe they still just mostly gain from Reddit discontinuing its API and third-party app support.
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