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Comment by danr4

5 years ago

As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033

122 comments

danr4

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dreyfan  5 years ago

I've yet to see a forum software that works as well as vBulletin and the clones of that did in the early to mid 2000s. Everything today is this weird "conversation" view and comments/threads constantly move around based on the whims of a voting audience.

bob1029  5 years ago

Development of high-quality forum software is something I have considered undertaking.

Hypothetically, If one were to offer something that was hosted and provided a trivial one-click sqlite export facility, would HN generally agree to participate in that sort of ecosystem? A public webhook could be exposed so that enterprising users could build their own replicas or other event-sourced systems on top... Account management would be simple and robust. PBKDF2 scheme over unconstrained passwords with optional 2nd factor of user's choice. All account facts aside from the primary key, email address, hash, salt and iteration count would reside in the public domain, so compliance with regs simply involves allowing the user to remove these items from the system. 1 simple button with a "are you sure" and that's that. The only traces are everything you knowingly placed in the public domain.

So, we are just talking about plaintext/markdown here, right? Hackernews comment-tier feature set, but threads stay around forever like reddit? This really doesn't seem like rocket science. Maybe add a tagging/labeling system like GitHub has so that users can quickly go lateral on related topics or comments?

I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. Keeping the tools heavily constrained and simple is the key to success here. Twitter is a good example of both. Look at the quality of conversation on HN. Arguably unparalleled as-is. What if these awesome conversation threads just kept going after the initial 24h? Wouldn't that be incredible?

  • julianlam  5 years ago

    > I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth.

    That's cute. I thought the same back in 2014 when I started building forum software.

    As it turns out, there's no one "perfect" feature set, and basic feature parity took far longer than I expected it to.

    But I love reading about new entrants to the forum software scene... Do it! Give me a run for my money :)

cmroanirgo  5 years ago

Not exactly sure what your requirements are but vanilla forums have a clean look, mobile friendly, and have pretty good customization. (Not sure if the latest version supports digest emails though)

https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla

jcelerier  5 years ago

Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to the phpbb and vBulletin of yore

  • Oddskar  5 years ago

    In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.

    • Zababa  5 years ago

      Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything, even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data.

      28 replies →

    • mortenjorck  5 years ago

      Same here. The old vBulletin / PHPbb format felt positively archaic once I got over the shock of how different the basic interactions are.

      I can understand some hesitance from people who are naturally wary of infinite scrolling, as the vast majority of implementations are terrible. Where Discourse succeeds, though, is in managing state such that it doesn't feel brittle when you're deep into a thread's history. The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.

      2 replies →

    • simias  5 years ago

      I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only because of the lack of proper threading.

      Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.

      2 replies →

  • nerdponx  5 years ago

    An interface like PHPBB or vBulletin, combined with the Markdown formatting + live preview and tagging/search of Discourse, would be ideal for me.

xpe  5 years ago

Zulip [1] is open source and (IMO) fantastic.

[1]: https://github.com/zulip

Karrot_Kream  5 years ago

I think Discourse is the first real attempt to bring forums in-line with "modern" UI expectations, which is why it feels like it won. There's probably lots of room to grow here. There's forums out there that allow SMTP-only [1] or SMTP and NNTP reading/posting [2], there's forum skins atop mailing lists like [3], there's distributed forums like Aether or Lemmy like [4, 5]. Unfortunately these are all new/raw.

[1]: https://lobste.rs

[2]: https://tade.link

[3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lis... for example

[4]: https://getaether.net/

[5]: https://lemmy.ml/

  • nirvdrum  5 years ago

    I really miss NNTP. I appreciate that spam was a huge problem, but it was really nice being able to discover and subscribe to a large number of topics and navigate them all from the same tool. And there was innovation in the client space.

    Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load channels from each server.

    As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than something like IRC.

    • comex  5 years ago

      With Discourse, you can enable mailing list mode and read all the Discourse instances from your email client. That’s what I do.

      Personally, I only have one Discourse instance I keep up to date on, but if that instance weren’t right there in my email client, I’d have zero.

      edit: The main caveat in my experience is that you probably want to click through onto the website if you’re planning to reply, both to be able to preview formatting, and to double-check that the post you’re replying to hasn’t been edited in a way that renders the reply unnecessary. (I wish there was a way to deliver edits over email.) But most of the time I’m just reading, and for that I just stick to my email client. The loss of edits doesn’t seem to be a big deal in practice.

    • chillfox  5 years ago

      I pay for a Reddit subscription, but it’s honestly not a great place for communities.

      The communities on Reddit is in my experience always lower quality, more combative and less friendly than communities on discord, discourse and irc.

      1 reply →

    • goodpoint  5 years ago

      > I really miss NNTP

      We really need a new NNTP, designed for p2p or federation.

      Lemmy/ActivityPub or Briar are the closest thing we have.

      It's amazing how quickly the software community forget lessons from the past.

  • int_19h  5 years ago

    I would argue that "modern UX expectations" is a large part of the problem with Discourse. Infinite scrolling is one prominent example. Wasteful whitespace is another.

majormajor  5 years ago

The SBNation article commenting system, introduced like ten years ago now, had a nice take on this. Nested conversations like HN, but with live updating as new comments came in, and tracking of read-vs-unread, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate posts.

That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for when viewing later.

mjrbrennan  5 years ago

I'm curious why Discourse feels almost as ephemeral as chat to you?

  • Gigachad  5 years ago

    It's probably the UI/design of it. Discourse supports infinite scroll and live updates so it kind of looks like an IM thread with a lot more padding.

    • codinghorror  5 years ago

      It's not though; all topics are permanent and searchable. So it's the best of both worlds. Have you ever tried searching chatrooms and 100+ channels? Excruciating.

      1 reply →

DantesKite  5 years ago

I suspect you’re right. It just doesn’t exist.

Discord and Slack both fulfill interesting niches, but everything else is composed of chewing gum and tape.

The closest thing is Reddit, but it’s not great because subreddit names can be taken over and it’s hard to topple moderators that refuse to give up power.

  • smusamashah  5 years ago

    If reddit is open source, can't we use reddit's software as a forum interface? Reddit is a great place for discussion chains which are visible and searchable.

    • saladuh  5 years ago

      It's not open source though. I think it used to be a while back but it hasn't for a long time. There's also the fact that it's more difficult to modify software and self host it when it was never built fir that, vs something that was (i.e. reddit vs Discourse

julianlam  5 years ago

Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla, Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the forum game.

The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today.

We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software to really make it the best offering out there

I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :)

  • natdempk  5 years ago

    Not trying to be mean, but I hit a bug within 3 seconds of using this software and figured I'd report it here:

    On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunch I can get stuck in a state where all my history is just the one thread I clicked into. Not totally sure what is going on here, but feels like the type of thing that shows up with manual JS page history management failing to handle rapid events quickly leading to race conditions.

    • julianlam  5 years ago

      Yep! That's exactly what you're seeing. Nice detective work!

      Definitely some papercuts with that system that I'd be happy to spend some time optimizing. I'll probably file a bug and look into it this week.

      Don't worry about being mean, if we didn't know how to take criticism, we would've gotten out of this game a long time ago. Every bug report (no matter how pedantic) ends up improving the software as a whole, and that ends up with everybody winning

  • coupdejarnac  5 years ago

    Is there any documentation about creating an integration with nodebb? For example, I have a course on gumroad, and I want to give write access to nodebb based on if a user has a current subscription on gumroad.

    • julianlam  5 years ago

      Sure! Custom integrations are our bread and butter (free software kind of doesn't pay the bills otherwise!)

      Shoot me an email at support@, and I'll give you some pointers. If you want us to do it, we can do that too.

mthld  5 years ago

Do you already know Flarum? If so, did you tried it?

https://flarum.org

  • messo  5 years ago

    Flarum is a built on PHP / Laravel and is easy to host even on shared hosting providers. It looks and behaves much like Discourse, but less resource intensive in my experience.

cblconfederate  5 years ago

analysis paralysis. PHPbb works fine, it 's only old if you re ageist.

  • kitsunesoba  5 years ago

    It’s been over a decade since I ran a forum but I recall phpBB specifically being chock full of security holes, probably more so than even Wordpress. If you didn’t stay on top of keeping it up to date you’d get hit with exploit-wielding bots that would cram your little forum full of spam designed to exploit Google’s ranking algorithms.