Comment by jasonjayr

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.