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Comment by 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.

28 comments

dreyfan

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agumonkey  5 years ago

I'm extremely surprised by this weird dichotomy. vbulletin era was "low" on tech yet there were a lot of nice chill places.. there was almost nothing special, no ease, few rules, convos were mostly humans and fun. Now there's kilotons of resources (brain and money) trying to make all this go to mars and yet it only creates frailty. Super odd.

  • codinghorror  5 years ago

    The software didn't change; the people did. Starting in 2014, everyone went online.

    • hsn915  5 years ago

      Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum.

      But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.

      People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?

      3 replies →

    • fartcannon  5 years ago

      What happened in 2014?

      I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).

      1 reply →

PeterCorless  5 years ago

https://xenforo.com/ — Paradox Interactive uses it for their Stellaris/HOI4/EU4/CK3 communities.

edit: e.g., https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universal...

  • the_pwner224  5 years ago

    Xenforo is also used for a lot of vehicle-specific forums. It works very well; modern design / features while still having good usability & UX.

  • bob1029  5 years ago

    I've set up a few instances of xenforo in the past (2013 ish). Really good kit. I didn't know it was still a thing.

buro9  5 years ago

I have something in Go that isn't too bad... it looks like this https://www.lfgss.com and powers sites like this http://forum.espruino.com/

Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side though... it was designed as a platform rather than a standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to use.

  • mftb  5 years ago

    Those home pages look pretty good and I like the go, single-exectable approach, but I have to say those docs look like more than I want to hassle with. That said, looks like you might be on a good path.

    • buro9  5 years ago

      The docs shouldn't be needed by anyone wanting to run a forum.

      But the whole forum is web API first, and the web site is just a client. The docs are there to say "anything you see this website doing, you can do it through a client you create"... and it doesn't have to be everything, if all you want to do is list publicly visible new conversations on a different website then it's a single API call that you can do from client side JavaScript.

      But... if you do want to create an entirely new application using the forum as a platform for it, i.e. a full blog system with the forum hidden but driving discussions, or an app where the forum is at the heart of it but the app looks like a cyclists ride database oriented around events and a calendar but with discussions per ride... well knock yourself out, the API makes that pretty easy and there are apps that do both of those things (though natch, they're closed source and the rides one charges over $200 per year per user for it).

numpad0  5 years ago

As someone grew up with 2ch forum(terrible place) I don’t get why vB gets such a high praise. Too much wasted screen real estate and already overcomplicated.

RHSeeger  5 years ago

vBulletin is still available, isn't it?

  • tyteen4a03  5 years ago

    From vB4 onwards it has becoming more and more of a hot pile of crap.

    XenForo is where it's at. Never used IPB but heard they're slipping.

  • dreyfan  5 years ago

    Yep, works great. Nobody uses it for anything new though.

    • Gigachad  5 years ago

      The last vBullitin site I used was hacked and never came back online. The overhead from running forum software in the age of mass automated abuse is just too great. It's really hard to justify the value of a forum that gets hacked, spammed, costs money, etc when Discord is free and works better for most people.

    • bsder  5 years ago

      Presumably mobile compatibility was the issue, no? Everybody nowadays wants to do everything on their phone.

      Also, didn't vBulletin have a lot of spam and security issues? It's kind of like WordPress in that using it is nice but managing it is hell.

  • AvocadoCake  5 years ago

    ProBoards exists and is nice to use, but it's not obvious to me it does anything better for software than Github issues.