Comment by marginalia_nu

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.