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PhpBB 3.3.10

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Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#161

Post by deltarholamda »

gnulinux wrote: post #11
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #6

I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess). Maybe they will make a comeback?

Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.

Forums are still doing well in specialized communities. Model-specific car forums, for example. When your Lincoln Town Car starts making a "whoomp whoomp whoomp" noise, you can usually find the answer in one of these forums.

They are tremendously useful still, and they also contain a lot of esoteric domain-specific knowledge you can't find elsewhere.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#162

Post by spiralx »

ycombinete wrote: post #79
BizarreByte wrote: post #38

I used to despise PhpBB, at the time I thought it was vastly inferior to SMF. SMF seemed far more professional, the closest you could get to vbulletin while being free. In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while. The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.

I wonder if vbulletin is still a superior product, or if the free products have caught up over the years, as forums lost popularity.

vBulletin appears to still be in active development so I would imagine it's still ahead of the crowd, whether phpBB has caught up to where vBulletin was a decade ago is the question.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#163

Post by account42 »

dgb23 wrote: post #106
losteric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anyone has experimented with algorithms optimized for sustainable long-term community building. What would that even look like?

Don’t know about algorithms, but HN does a good job of being a forum. I think it’s a combination of sensible guidelines, restricted community moderation (votes and flags) and very good manual moderation.

HN is decent for discussion about news but is not great for any longer-running discussions - probably intentionally.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#164

Post by mattl »

scrlk wrote: post #158
mattl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Janny?

Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team. Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.

Ah, makes sense.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#165

Post by unixhero »

hal0 wrote: post #135
unixhero wrote: post #129

I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.

All these names I haven't heard muttered in years. What about vBulletin? Conforums?

vbulletin is not open source and not free, although a legacy and good choice for those kinds of scenarios.

Conforums seems defunct

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#166

Post by forgotpwd16 »

avx56 wrote: post #50
derrida wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was early reddit code the bunch of arc macros and this here (hn) originally? Was it basically a fork of pg code for this (site you are reading now)?

It was (is?) Python: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Before the Python rewrite it was written on Common Lisp: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#167

Post by lolinder »

mariusor wrote: post #109
lolinder wrote: post #9

Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never…

I think it's a mistake to equate all services that are built on top of ActivityPub to "social media" based on what Mastodon offers. There's nothing stopping a forum like service appearing that offers federation. ActivityPub *should* (though nobody currently does, as far as I know) solve the problem of requiring a new identity for each service that you want to interact with. Ideally in a federated network you only nee…

I guess I'm the opposite: I view each community I interact with as distinct, and I don't particularly want to combine them into one account.

It's like real life: I might really enjoy hanging out with my in-laws and also love my D&D group, but I don't want to introduce them to each other and I show each of them slightly different facets of my personality. I don't mind having multiple accounts if that's what it takes to keep the interactions in separate boxes.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#168

Post by forgotpwd16 »

derrida wrote: post #41
gnulinux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.

Was early reddit code the bunch of arc macros and this here (hn) originally? Was it basically a fork of pg code for this (site you are reading now)?

It's the other way around. Reddit predates HN, and one of the reasons HN was made was to recreate early reddit culture (ref: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ycombinator.com/announc...).

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#169

Post by account42 »

ta8903 wrote: post #115
imiric wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.

Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion. 1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that…

I don't disagree with your points (well 1 and 3 anyway) but you can't just ignore the major advantage of threaded discussions: that you can branch off into different directions without derailing the thread as a whole. For example this entire subthread is about forums in general and now about hierarchical vs. linear discussion - if you actually wanted to talk about phpBB (the subject of this thread) then with a linear view you'd have to sift through and enless supply of unrelated comments. Here you can just collapse subtrees that go in an uninteresting direction.

I also don't think your problems with threaded discussion are unsolvable. I've not seen any forum implement this but I don't see why you couldn't allow someone to reply to multiple comments at once. For display you'd show the reply under the topmost parent and then only a link (or pre-collapsed comment) under the other ones.

For updates, Reddit solves this by highlighting new comments since your last visits (or other previous visits you can select from), which works really well - except that they limit the feature to paying users and subreddit moderators. HN doesn't have that feature presumably because HN doesn't want long-running discussions.

For (2) Reddit (or RES anyway) also has a solution: hovering over the [parent] link shows the parent post.

The clutter vs. minimalism is an entirely separate issue. While I wouln't advocate for giant signatures, I think some customization (avatar, titles, etc.) can be important for community building.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#170

Post by lolinder »

POPOSYS wrote: post #111
lolinder wrote: post #9

Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never…

I do not understand what do you mean by "interlocking" and "overlapping" networks. The word "federate" you use very near to these words make me believe that you are talking about some technical feature - but I do not know that. What kind of "interlocking" and "overlapping" are you writing about here?

I'm talking about interpersonal relationships, not tech. The phpBB model allowed for communities to be informally related by virtue of having overlapping members, without any need to have any technical feature that formalized those relationships.

In real life I can be a part of a bowling club and a church, and I don't need the club to know anything about the church. They're distinct entities related only by the fact that I am part of each of them.

This confusion is kind of what I'm getting at: modern "social media" and "social networks" have coopted the vocabulary of real human relationships to the point where people assume these words have technical meanings.

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