Bring back crappy forums • Hacker News Board

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#371

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

econ wrote: post #365

dredmorbius wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now the hard part: Which fields are allowed? Which aren't?

It's not so hard but does require some debate and research. Only the sensitive info needs to be contained. For [say] a webshop you have at least the name, address info, email and phone number. Perhaps payment info or coupon codes could be included. Gradually make it more sophisticated. It's just an example. The point is for stuff used often enough to find its way into html and improve. The time date picker was a fun…

Thanks.

Coming up with a standard form is of course the hard part, but the basics you suggest are probably in there. There is of course all the bit about falsehoods programmers believe about names, addresses, emails, and the rest:

https://ctemm.me/falsehoods/>

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=falsehoods%20programmers%20believe...>

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#372

Post by The_President » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

realityfactchex wrote: post #312

willis936 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Discourse has one major technical challenge currently, that I know about. It doesn't work (for being logged in and interacting) on iOS 15 and older as of the past year. It's view-only for those devices. Because of a load-bearing CSS attribute, as I understand it. So, it's hard to consider it a web-standards supportive platform anymore. Or, at least, it's a web platform with a technical challenge of not being interact…

I bypassed their arbitrary "old browser" check with a javascript line that set a flag. Works flawlessly after that.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#373

Post by The_President » Sat, Jul 04, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

shoobiedoo wrote: post #60

Magi604 wrote: post #21

I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off. It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I r…

That little bit of personality is what made forums so much fun. The early 2000s somethingawful forums were such a goldmine. I've never laughed so hard in my life at the antics between users. When this person or that guy or some infamous user would show up, it would kick off a thread and it felt so much more "real" and personal. The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it…

SomethingAwful was an important prominent internet culture anchor for a long time, enforcing good moderation and content standards. I checked out of there the day Lowtax died and never looked back. Prophetic truth in the tagline "The internet makes you stupid."

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#374

Post by schnitzelstoat » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 8:23 AM UTC

KajMagnus wrote: post #368

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if a hybrid might work well - a Reddit/HN style system for comments, but a simple forum style method of post ranking by last activity. So if you make a comment on a post, the post goes to the top of the page. This could work for comment threads too - where the comment threads on the post are also ranked by last activity. It keeps the nice branching comment threads we've grown used to, but avoids having upvot…

That's how GitHub discussion works :- ) (or did you know?) Look here: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/ — by default, sorted by last activity. But you can also sort by newest, or by votes. For comment threads, look at e.g.: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/5509?sort=old — sorted by time, by default. But you can also sort by upvotes. *** The forum software I'm developing, https://www.Talkyard.io , is a…

Thanks! I don't tend to use the GitHub discussion very much (just commenting on a few Issues) so I didn't know!

The Talkyard example is interesting - how does it differ to the algorithms Reddit uses to sort by "Best" or "Hot" when looking at comments (I think Best is the default now too, not Top, so presumably it takes recency etc. into account somehow).

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#375

Post by 3dedb728-3f77 » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

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…

Do you think a simple java spring forum would work? It should be pretty simple to make actually...

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#376

Post by openair18 » Wed, Jul 08, 2026, 3:40 PM UTC

postatic wrote: post #65

absolutely love forums! It's also a kind of a rite of passage for devs to create a forum if you are learning new language (back in the days) - an advanced version of "Create your first blog" type of thing? A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise t…

Hey can’t seem to DM you (probably user error) but in the world cup pickem site you built, the quarter finals are not updating. Could you look at that? Thanks!