I like it. Never noticed a forum with a wall of shame before even though I lurked on a few old skool car forums in the mid-2000s. I do remember a heck of a scrap occurring sometime 2005/6 between 300zx.co.uk and a couple of the other forums of the time. Loads of people banned, even longtime users, site admins, committee members. It was a mess.
The "wall of shame" on this site comes pretty directly from the Something Awful forums Leper's Colony: https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php
I love it. I was recently nostalgic about phpbb forums. Thought it would be cool to build a site like that. How is the SEO? Seems like poor SEO (never mind Reddit) was one of the reasons they really fell off the map.
remix has some good built-in APIs for creating SEO-performant pages. everything is server-side rendered for starters, but it's also easy to add meta tags for each page in your react component routes
Early 2000s message boards were so much fun. vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up. Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
Back in the day wrote some scripts to load view.php on a new post to quickly increase views and have everyone asking what's so interesting about it.
After reddit implodes, I vote that we bring back forums and/or BBS's
I built an “ssh shell” with this in mind. It’s actually just a hello world app that prompts for your name, because it turns out that’s all you need. Someday I may build a modern BBS via ssh.
Yes, I’m aware you can use telnet, but I thought SSH felt more modern.
Early 2000s message boards were so much fun. vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up. Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
>hilariously awful moderation I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war
Norms against flame wars and the old "don't feed the trolls" made for some really excellent experiences growing up on forums as a kid (and instructive experiences when I ignored that advice). It's too bad we weren't able to bring that energy to social media, because wow is the alternative depressing to behold.
Can I just say that you've done a remarkably good job at capturing the feel of old school forums without going overboard into old school UI/UX? The spacing, font choices and just general layout feel modern enough without being overbearing.
Early 2000s message boards were so much fun. vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up. Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
>hilariously awful moderation I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war
I'm always surprised by this when these types of threads come up on HN. A lot of people seem to remember these forums being moderated poorly, or being run by egomaniacs. My experience is the opposite. The internet forums I spent any time on were generally run by passionate people who cared about the community and donated their time to help keep them running smoothly.
I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.
As is Something Awful, which OP lists as inspiration. The forums are apparently still self sustaining financially, but I don't believe the user count has moved significantly for around a decade. It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
The main thing is the chronological ordering and lack of karma ordering leads to more freewheeling, breezy conversations. People aren't ego posting as much and are more liberal with speaking their minds, even if their views are unpopular. There are less flamewars, though you also miss out on some deeper discussions. This is also why I like Blind so much, where anonymity has caused it to be the best source of advice o…
Additionally, topics being sorted by "what post received a comment most recently" meant that high-quality threads stayed near the top for a long time, leading to much better discoverability. When I want to learn a lot about some obscure hobby, a dedicated forum is an extremely good place to go. Read the top 5-10 threads in most of the categories, and you've got a fantastic jumping off point.