Comment by divan
9 hours ago
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 forum quite a challenging task. I have some forums died purely because it was impossible to update them anymore without blowing up half of the functionality.
Bring back non-crappy forums!
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 interactive (so users can post and interact) from web standards supporting devices but lacking whatever HTML standards were introduced since as recently as 2021.
I'd call it a technical challenge. Literally the CSS language framework / build process is just not that flexible.
Semantic design development process became separated from semantic HTML serving somewhere along the way.
Maybe that's fine and quite good for 99% of uses. But I see this one as a glaring technical question mark.
Bringing it back to the titular point in the OP, the "crappy forums" do not seem to (cause some users to) suffer from this problem.
[0] https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...
> 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.
The phones that can't upgrade past iOS 15 are over ten years old. What is the current iOS 15 user base? It's probably more cost-effective for Discourse to gift affected users a compatible device than to keep old code in place.
It's really not the same, isn't it?... the threading model that was popularized by Discourse is really not appealing at all, it's very impersonal, it almost feels like ti calls for shallow communications where people show up, dump a thread and two comments and never returns...
Nothing beats vBulletin or IPV...
Discourse threading model fit the with communities where not everything has to be a news and be commented as a news with a quick opinion.
And it works well that's why lots of of big players use it(KDE, Nvidia...) even Microsoft for the Flight simulator forum but it is true that you have to get to know how it works : the go to today timeline button for example, see comment in context etc. Once you are used to it you enjoy it and see how it pushes people to read the whole discussion before answering unlike reddit or here where people may tend to place their focus on threads with lots of comments & ignore others.
Yes, Discourse and Flarum have been a breath of fresh air. Something was unsettling with Discourse to me though - it had an opinionated UI, and some design choices that made it feel different from traditional (-BB type) forums. It seems to be a great fit for technical communities, but not for others (taking my own words with a grain of salt here).
I don't like Discourse because it's not paged. Infinite scrolling a thread just feels weird.
Discourse is horrid on slow devices, try it.
Let's just make something better, please, and that doesn't require JavaScript as we are at it.
Discourse is not a forum any more than Reddit or Facebook is a forum.
Discourse and Reddit are both forums. If you say they aren't, you're using a pretty idiosyncratic definition of forum.
Yeah forum software was not designed for a web as adversarial as it became in the 2010s. Pretty much every forum I used to haunt ended its day being hacked, pumped for credentials, and with a nuked database. Even before that, the spam management was like a full time job for the mods.
What allowed Reddit and the like to survive and supplant the forums was they had the economies of scale to deal with the bullshit.
Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
I think that way back when, there were SO MANY variants of the theme because the core parts of the software were pretty easy to get going. A lot of developers, new to the scene, would make a discussion forum. The devil's in the details, though, making sure things are secure, scalable, moderator tools are on point, etc.
Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.
Yeah, you are absolutely right! I think this is my new weekend sesh... my brand new vBulletin...
Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?
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It would be pretty easy as forum software is relatively simple. If I were to do this, I would build it on Elixir/Phoenix so it's actually performant, not the React bloatware flavor of the month. Also, it would be interesting to spin this up as a FAAS (Forum as a Service) like Shopify, but for forums. The whole thing is managed and customers can spin up a forum with a custom domain and look/feel without worrying about the infrastructure. Maybe this exists already? I haven't looked into this space in many years.
It's almost like a ToDo app. We write them in every conceivable language just to kick the tires.
I just started a project with Phoenix/Elixir and I'm really excited about the concurrency and distributed nature of Erlang. I might have to try out making a forum, just for fun.
Sure. People post them all the time. Most are HN clones. All of them die with a whimper after the initial HN juice is gone.
The problem isn't technical, the problem is that social media and Reddit already do what people wanted forums to do, and did it better in many ways (albeit at the cost of centralization and homogeneity.) There is just no niche in the web ecosystem for old-school forums anymore, other than appeal to nostalgia.