9 ms·

Bring back crappy forums

• Robotbeat 3mo ago
  For spaceflight, https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com is still alive and kicking (although it has branched out and is super active on Youtube now).
• nullsanity 3mo ago
  [dead]
• victorbjorklund 3mo ago
  Im so glad we in Elixir have elixirforum which (does not look crappy) is a traditional forum and feels like the internet 15 years ago.
• ggm 3mo ago
  I have a lot of sympathy with this. I use some topic specific old school web forums and they feel better all round than the discord channels/forums. I suspect it's an age/attitude thing. The implicit "My forum my rules" autocracy shows its upsides on a well curated space: trolling and spam dealt with rapidly.
  • naturalmovement 3mo ago
    It notably lacked up/downvoting which is a cancer foisted upon open discussion. Discussions ran chronologically as they would in real life. Imagine having a remote control you could point at people to increase and decrease their speaking volume. That's what voting is.
    • ggm 3mo ago
      Remote mute control was contentious in early MBone apps. Lots of good discussion about why they were useful and when. Cisco webex went out the door with one and it's wonderfully "undemocratic" and equally useful. Just stop. Done. Volume, hadn't thought about it like that.
    • notabotiswear 3mo ago
      The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post…
      • socalgal2 3mo ago
        Yea, I think HN should remove the them. Or at least not display them.
        • coldpie 3mo ago
          Years ago, HN used to actually display the score on each comment, like Reddit does. I'm glad they removed it.
      • ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
        > The irony in me pressing the upvote button on this post… this ;-)
    • paytonjjones 3mo ago
      That sounds horribly toxic and corrosive for a dinner party. It sounds pretty useful for when you're chatting while waiting for the bus and there's someone on drugs there screaming obscenities. Unfortunately the Internet is both.
      • coldpie 3mo ago
        It is the website owner's decision to allow people on drugs screaming obscenities on their platform. They are allowed to kick those people out, and you're allowed to leave if you don't like the people in that community. Good moderation is a requirement for healthy communities.
    • devilbunny 3mo ago
      One thing that Slashdot moderation got right is that you can’t be more than +5 or less than -1. Groupthink is much less forceful with those limitations.
    • jusssi 3mo ago
      There's an important distinction: raising / lowering the volume of someone in general, or just a particular thing they just said. The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.
    • Little_Kitty 3mo ago
      A problem on forums was people quoting large comments, adding their response of "this" and then an additional signature. Digg and later Reddit moving that junk out of sight and gradually educating people not to do so was a big win.
  • DocTomoe 3mo ago
    The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1]. [1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html
    • Terr_ 3mo ago
      While I recognize the name of the domain, I'm getting some weird TLS cert warnings.
      • naturalmovement 3mo ago
        It's a cleartext http site. No TLS. The link is bad.
        • mr_mitm 3mo ago
          It does offer TLS. The certificate just doesn't contain `www.catb.org` in its SAN. (But dozens of other host names.)
    • JamesTRexx 3mo ago
      Browser warning: www.catb.org uses an invalid security certificate.
    • ggm 3mo ago
      I think I was on more than I added. I kept seeing these posts which said "plonk" and then.. nothing.
    • lyu07282 3mo ago
      it was just a few years before my time, I sometimes read through old threads on usenet it feels like internet archeology. If you still remember it, what do you think about how it compares with today's discussion culture? Killfiles are interesting, but nowadays it seems almost impossible to block everyone crazy on X/Twitter, perhaps more feasible back then a few months ago for example from my usenet archeology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160709
  • CM30 3mo ago
    I've sometimes suspected it's an investment thing. A Discord server or subreddit is free, can be setup or abandoned at any time, and (on Reddit) can be taken over by the site or another team whenever you move on. So, there's a not much of a reason to care how badly you're running the place. You didn't put any time or effort into its setup, and you're not losing money if the community dies out. Meanwhile a standalone forum costs money to host, and it feels bad to pay $X per month for a ghost town. So, there's at least some level of interest in keeping it running smoothly and fixing issues, since otherwise you're wasting your time and money. Alternatively, having to pay might just mean the average forum owner is an adult with real world experience rather than a kid or teen or internet shut in that's running the community for laugh/sees it as a quick way to get power over people.
• zerobees 3mo ago
  I think the nostalgia here is misplaced. No one took the forums from us. They're still around. They're just not fun to use unless you're already invested in the community and its lore. And truth to be told, I don't want to become a part of the furnace enthusiasts community, set up an account, read ten pages of rules, and then get chastised by a moderator for posting in the wrong sub-forum just because I have a furnace maintenance question. I think there are greater tragedies playing out on the internet than people preferring Reddit to phpBB.
• dchuk 3mo ago
  Oh how I miss old school forums. It’s crazy to me how communities are wholesale embracing discord, which just is not the right form factor at all for anything but ephemeral real time chat. I remember engaging in threads on real forums for literally years. It was so great
  • conductr 3mo ago
    I feel discord is the same medium IRC served, there’s not really a contemporary equivalent for forums. Reddit is closest but not quite it.
  • account42 3mo ago
    I've even seen communities that are literally centered around an old school forum open an official discord either builds a clique or drains people away from the forum - both of which will kill the forum eventually.
• eleventen 3mo ago
  I'm not sure I understand the difference between "crappy forums" and subreddits. They have all the same features. Tags function as sections. You can sort threads chronologically. Karma. I suspect there's no actual difference, the author just liked the sort of people who were willing to deal with the traditional "crappy forum" interface for the sake of connecting around some niche hobby, and it provided enough friction to promote adherence to the community's culture. There are just more people on the internet now. The problem always boils down to some version of Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  • RattlesnakeJake 3mo ago
    The crappy forums don't have to let anyone register without a vouching process if they don't want to. They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed by a mob of overly-enthusiastic or angry strangers who don't know or follow the community's etiquette.
    • eleventen 3mo ago
      Valid points. I was never a member of any forums with closed, invite-only registration, and I've never been part of a reddit community that had to deal with front page traffic or brigading, so I sort of assume this is the median experience. The maker communities, music subs, and local/city subs I'm in do not have any of these problems.
    • ranger_danger 3mo ago
      > They also don't accidentally end up on the Reddit Front Page and get swarmed Wouldn't this by definition mean the size of the community must always remain small enough (whatever that magic number is)?
      • MrPowerGamerBR 3mo ago
        Not quite, a forum for a specific niche wouldn't have their posts pushed to random users that do not care about that specific topic because those users wouldn't be on that community in the first place. The Reddit Front Page and especially the Reddit mobile app with their push notifications, keep pushing posts from random communities to the front page AND to push notifications, which makes random people that do not know anything about the community to post random stupid things. I also blame the fact that the Reddit mobile app incentivizes people to comment with gamified streaks, so people are more incentivized to comment useless things on threads.
• vnext 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• a1o 3mo ago
  One thing about these old school forums is they are something you host yourself (directly or paying a server somewhere), and this requires but knowledge on doing so, and time to do its maintenance (beyond moderation and stuff). Additionally, I don’t think simple machines and phpbb development has kept as strong as the people trying to spam it.
  • transcriptase 3mo ago
    phpbb was a nightmare to keep patched (even without any plugins/customization) and free of spam accounts back when forums were in their heyday and spamming wasn’t even that lucrative. 20 years ago a fresh install via cpanel and getting indexed would be enough to have hundreds of accounts being registered just for SEO juice from the homepage URL field in user profile pages. I can only imagine how infinitely worse things must be now.
  • Gigachad 3mo ago
    Discorse is probably the best forum software these days. It's incredibly nice and works just as well on mobile and desktop.
• protocolture 3mo ago
  They are called Reddit or Discord these days. And many (many many) crappy forums were hosted on crappy free sub domain hosting, so theres little difference moving to a subreddit or discord. I remember sending a request for a database export to jconserv and getting nothing, just before the website started to fall apart. Later finding out that the owner just walked off or died or something.
  • AlphaSite 3mo ago
    Reddit doesnt work because subreddits crosspolinate and float to the top so theyre rather prone to brigading and intermingling. We don't really get distinct subreddits anymore.
    • protocolture 3mo ago
      Depends how you browse. Often I will go to a subreddit and read it like a forum.
• gkanai 3mo ago
  The best forums still have users and traffic. For instance, for Toyota Land Cruiser owners, the best information has always been at ih8mud. Reddit doesnt hold a candle to Mud for the depth of information available (for that community.)
  • winterbourne 3mo ago
    This is the truth. For DIY pursuits, niche forums are far superior to reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, or any other social media.
• Magi604 3mo ago
  I miss forums. When they were in their heyday I was an active participant in anywhere from a couple to half a dozen, shifting with whatever happened to be my hobby at the time. And local forums based around hobbies like music and photography were a great way to meet people in person because you already had something in common to start things off. It was also a place to find really in depth information on a topic. I remember doing research for my multi-day hikes and outdoor travels by browsing the threads in the stormfront survival subforum (note: I do not condone what they represent, but lots of them were paranoid and preparing for "the coming race war" and they just had good prepping and survival info). To me Reddit and HN have filled the void left by the decline of forums, but it's not the same. Perhaps the thing I miss the most is the ability to have avatars and custom signatures and titles to give your online persona a little bit of personality and flair.
  • shoobiedoo 3mo ago
    That little bit of personality is what made forums so much fun. The early 2000s somethingawful forums were such a goldmine. I've never laughed so hard in my life at the antics between users. When this person or that guy or some infamous user would show up, it would kick off a thread and it felt so much more "real" and personal. The ultra niche subreddits have that vibe, but as soon as they get to around 10k users, it turns into nothing but an upvote dopamine chase.
    • Gigachad 3mo ago
      The era of niche subreddits is over these days. Reddit started ignoring subscriptions and just pooling all posts together and suggesting things the algorithm thinks you are interested in regardless of subscriptions.
      • Little_Kitty 3mo ago
        Old.reddit.com is the only way to get something useful, "new" reddit is slow, ad riddled and full of irrelevant and unwanted noise. Discoverability of new subs used to be a bit of an issue, but people do cross-post.
• mproud 3mo ago
  Quality vs. Quantity. The forums I still go to are hyperspecific, and yes, the experience is crappier. But because of that, only the diehards frequent them, meaning you generally get better, smarter discussions.
• NDlurker 3mo ago
  2 of the best from my high school days are still around, though I barely even lurk anymore. https://forum.bodybuilding.com https://forum.bodybuilding.com https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/ https://www.bluelight.org/community/forums/
  • LostMyLogin 3mo ago
    Misc was a magical place back in the day. I'll never forget there was a kid that weighed something akin to 600 pounds who posted as a troll but everyone started giving him helpful advice and encouragement. He lost hundreds of pounds and I believe even entered a bodybuilding show.
  • khurs 3mo ago
    WARNING NSFW: Bluelight is a recreational drugs forum, so you may otherwise want to click on it from work.
• kjshsh123 3mo ago
  Social media won because it's better for the consumer and producer. For the producer, it's free infrastructure but it's also advertising. Having a large subreddit means your game getting recommended to others and potentially being seen being introduced to more people. For the consumer, these social media sites do usually do provide a better experience in showing people what they want to see and keeping away stuff they don't. I'm sympathetic to forums just because I think if someone likes something they shouldn't need to join a potentially social media site with potentially toxic designs and sub-communities. But these are negative internalities that people mostly ignore.
  • Robotbeat 3mo ago
    Social media is more addictive. That's a huge reason it won.
    • Gigachad 3mo ago
      I was discussing with a friend how I'm saddened that all the independent art websites basically died out. While they still exist, they are a shadow of their former selves while the viewers and artists all moved to Twitter, a website that is absolutely horrible as a replacement. But it's just impossible to compete with the fact all eyeballs have been moved to social media so you are either on it or you aren't seen. Even if as a viewer you have to scroll past 20 political bots for every one genuine art piece you see.
  • neya 3mo ago
    Social media has censorship, which most old school forums couldn't simply replicate with volume, even with moderators in place. So, a lot of times you will find unfiltered discussion about certain topics as opposed to a controlled narrative you will get on social media.
    • dawnerd 3mo ago
      Lot of forums would even solve it by having anything goes sections.
    • 3mo ago
• kumiko_studio 3mo ago
  the thing "crappy" forums had that modern platforms killed: you were talking to the same ~200 regulars, not performing for an algorithm — small and stable beat big and optimized.
  • morkalork 3mo ago
    Discord and IRC feel like this
    • someonebaggy 3mo ago
      Interestingly IRC used to have, but no longer has, a feeling that you are writing for people who are online right now, because message delivery was only real-time. It still is, but now everyone uses bouncers or always-on connections so people who return hours in the future are more likely to reply to what you said.
  • explosionpunch 3mo ago
    This is a great point, having experienced just this firsthand just recently. I launched an online boardgame and tried announcing it in a bunch of different places - boardgamegeek, some relevant subreddits, elixirforum. While the other forums got views, the one that actually got some real engagement and comments was the boardgamegeek forum, arguably the "crappy" one of the three. Although it's "crappy" only in the sense that it's pretty no-frills and just feels kind of old-school.
    • kumiko_studio 3mo ago
      exactly — "no-frills" and "old-school" usually just means the UI isn't competing with the conversation for your attention.
• doginasuit 3mo ago
  > We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different. I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the people carrying the conversation tend to change with each comment. Even with all its problems, I can't think of another format that can match it in terms of sharing the spotlight among a diverse set of voices. I could never really get into the twitter format because it seems to be about a particularly spicy take followed by long string of replies to that take, at least without additional clicks that completely change the context. Its single virtue seemed to be its departure from anonymity which allowed it to be a showcase for voices that were already influential within society. The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion, and it is hard to go back to once the wave of nostalgia passes.
  • mcphage 3mo ago
    > the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. But very difficult to have those conversations.
  • dleeftink 3mo ago
    Depends on what we value, I suppose; a depth-first style that surfaces isolated chains or a breadth-first style that surfaces interleaved replies.
  • jancsika 3mo ago
    > The oldschool forum format requires a lot more scrolling and superfluous content that is unrelated to the discussion On the other hand, the flatness and default chronology of those scrolls provide a reliable WYSIWYG experience the Reddit trees lack. E.g., forum noob reads scrolls and sees X% of $bad. Forum noob posts new scroll prepared to get tolerable level of $bad (or hopefully less). Forum noob2 then comes and considers X% of $bad intolerable. Forum noob2 gets deterred from posting a scroll. Tree noob reads trees where the visible branches do not contain $bad. Tree noob gets unexpected level of $bad in the first Y minutes. After Z minutes, 100% of $bad has been folded away into hidden branches. After Z minutes, Tree noob2 reads the tree with no visible branches containing $bad. Tree noob2 decides it is safe to post a tree... Same problem for branches shuffling over time. You can read the Bitcoin pizza guy's scroll today in the same order everyone else did. But even on HN, how do I play back the branches shuffling up and down for the responses to the initial post about Dropbox?
• focusgroup0 3mo ago
  [dead]
• returnInfinity 3mo ago
  Reddit, Quora, Twitter, Pinterest won. Now facebook is trying to build a new app.
• neya 3mo ago
  Not crappy by any means, but, till date, Elixir forum (elixirforum.com) simply has the best mix of knowledge, etiquette and discussions on any and most topics around Elixir. I hope they never retire it ever. I still feel the community support whenever I participate there. People genuinely are also interested in what you're working on, etc. I could never get this from Reddit.
• vladsiu 3mo ago
  [dead]
• spiderfarmer 3mo ago
  The problem with crappy forums is that young people don't know how they work. And forums with only old people die. Because people just tend to die. That's why I made my 20+ year old niche agricultural forum a hybrid: a social media like feed plus a traditional forum. It fits the huge amount of image posts better as well. Of course I ran into some user revolt redesigning it this way, but users mostly like it. https://www.tractorfan.app https://www.tractorfan.app
• cs02rm0 3mo ago
  I think they lost something too. I'm still active on a UK car forum called PistonHeads. But the user base changed. We lost the calm, car-focused, informative nature of it. The main website is still oriented around cars but the forum became overwhelmed with people who only came to post about politics. And their posting was more aggressive and confrontational rather than knowledge seeking or sharing. I can't prove it, but I'm certain some accounts are paid to promote / undermine political parties and causes. The product promotion has a harder time getting through though. And at least it's not Instagram or Tiktok. The internet as a whole just isn't what it was.
  • jesterson 3mo ago
    Your observations can largely be applied to pretty much forum out there. Every single one was hijacked with either ignorant/stupid people without intelligence and/or bots pushing particular topic. Oh and the SEO managers, how could i forgot those. And now when the knowledge is a golden mine for all sorts of openai/claude/other IA, the situation will likely exacerbate further. I really miss a place where intelligent people can talk and exchange ideas with mutual respect. It seems like all these places are largely gone by now.
  • conductr 3mo ago
    I think this was able to occur as genuine new user growth disappeared. So the engagement of the community churns and opens room for off topic discussion. Then politics being what it’s been enters.
• Bender 3mo ago
  Many still exist just many of us make them private or physical community oriented. Making a forum openly public and especially allowing search engines is just asking for high interaction moderation, defending against well funded groups and a myriad of unstables. Few have the level of masochism and perseverance required for that. Hats off to team dang for pulling that off here.
• irrlichthn 3mo ago
  I run a small forum and am also the moderator of some small subreddits. I must say the toxicity of sub reddits is so much higher, and people on the old "crappy" forum are so much more polite. I don't know why this is, but maybe because the users flocking to old school forums are maybe a bit older?
• unsungNovelty 3mo ago
  Forums are communities which are curated. If it has a good owner, it will nurture good discussions. Because they have to adhere to rules. Or be banned. There was a tech magazine forum in India which was crazy cool. Learned a lot from it. But most forums go through a learning process. Way too many great discussions and it gets popular. And then some new/old idiots will start pushing the lines which will lead to over moderation. But once we are done with a couple of this fiascos, the forum will settle down and become a lot better and worth staying. But this can be off-putting to all the parties involved. So we went to the wild west which is social media where I chip in and leave as u please. And you can talk sh*t as u please as well. You are not invested and don't have to be. I am still invested in Archlinux forums. Although not very active. And was super active in Manjaro Linux forums until Phillip went super hostile against the users and I moved to Arch. It used discourse. As am exploring BSD these days, I am in FreeBSD forums and unitedbsd.com - lurking. And UnitedBSD uses flarum.org which I think is the best forum software available as of now. Definitely better than Discourse. We should have more forums. Coming to think of it, I learn more in forums than from social media communities.
• NordStreamYacht 3mo ago
  They're still around, and the signal to noise ratio is much improved as the more prolific spammers moved away to social media. I'm a lurker on a couple of automotive forums and a watch forum and they're doing quite nicely.
• postatic 3mo ago
  absolutely love forums! It's also a kind of a rite of passage for devs to create a forum if you are learning new language (back in the days) - an advanced version of "Create your first blog" type of thing? A while back ago, I created HN Plus (hn[.]plus) (for some reason it gets blocked) - anyway, wanted to give people a way to create their own HN clone - still being used today and it was a very interesting exercise to replicate all the niche features of HN.
  • openair18 2mo ago
    Hey can’t seem to DM you (probably user error) but in the world cup pickem site you built, the quarter finals are not updating. Could you look at that? Thanks!
• charcircuit 3mo ago
  The major reason social media won out is they treated themselves as a proper business that made scale plays. What forums obsessed over the user onboarding process? What forums obsessed over marketing and user acquisition? What forums were tracking user churn and how to prevent it? What forums responded to the user demand for mobile apps? The issue is that these sites primarily were ran by people who wanted to build a community as opposed to wanting to build a forum platform. So really social media were actually competing against the forum companies and forums companies failed to modernize and failed to compete against social media ability to recommend new communities to users.
• possibleworlds 3mo ago
  There is no need to “bring back” forums, there are plenty that already exist. You just need to participate in them if that’s what you want.
  • 8-prime 3mo ago
    With how many times I have seen the "forum" for a community be a Discord server I would say that there has been a noticable shift away from independently hosted forums. Which is what I would associate with a "proper" forum.
  • prmoustache 3mo ago
    This, I don't really understand this "bring back" things, there are a handful of forums I am visiting almost daily. And they are probably my most visited websites alongside hackernews and a couple of others.
    • salaryman777 3mo ago
      Could you list a few?
      • prmoustache 3mo ago
        electronic music production (hosted by elektron but discussion about other gear is accepted): https://elektronauts.com https://elektronauts.com cycling: https://velocipedesalon.com https://velocipedesalon.com https://forums.thepaceline.net https://forums.thepaceline.net simracing: https://simracingonline.co.uk https://simracingonline.co.uk https://www.lfs.net/forum https://www.lfs.net/forum https://www.overtake.gg/forums/ https://www.overtake.gg/forums/ And a few others I visit less frequently but I won't mention because I have already leaked a lot of information :-) I guess there are still a ton of forums that cover a wide variety of hobbies/interests.
      • mlrtime 3mo ago
        https://www.avsforum.com/ https://www.avsforum.com/ has been running for around 30 years. Still my go to for in depth HT discussion. Much better than reddit.
• apexalpha 3mo ago
  Many people are not aware that this is mostly a English internet thing. I still frequent a few forums in Dutch and Germen. Still around, still modded by volunteers, still great. Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. Still rocking PhpBB often!
  • thaumasiotes 3mo ago
    > Since AI essentially solved translation I even frequent Russian forums again. I'm struggling with the connection between these two things. It sounds like you used to frequent Russian forums before AI essentially solved translation. That being the case, you are surely able to understand the Russian forums. So what changed?
  • lclee1 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • gnoll_of_gozag 3mo ago
    how actually good is it at russian? online russian is just over halfway full of esoteric slang, multilingual puns and references
    • apexalpha 3mo ago
      I mostly frequent forums hosting stuff westerns forums wont such as firmwares and roms. Its perfectly fine for me, really. Sometimes I read nonsense in English and thats probably slang in Russian, yeah
  • conductr 3mo ago
    There was a huge wave of everyone jumping to Facebook groups in the US. I feel like facebook likely wasn’t at critical mass yet everywhere so they probably missed it. Then it became pretty quickly obvious that sending your traffic to facebook wasn’t necessarily the best idea. So hopefully they learned from our mistake or had better foresight
• TabTwo 3mo ago
  No, bring back NetNews/NNTP. This spreading of communities over dozens of (commercial) services is annoying. And don't get me started about open source projects using WhatsApp groups as their main place to discuss things.
• winterbourne 3mo ago
  I run an active forum in the DIY space, and another site that aggregates new build threads from hundreds of niche forums. Forums for people building cars, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, cabins, musical instruments, etc. The classic forum format and tight-knit communities are ideal for what are called "communities of practice": like-minded people who get together to help each other build/create/make/do something. A well-moderated build thread is best suited to a classic linear non-threaded posting format, and that's why thousands of niche DIY forums still exist. Pining for the forum heyday is common on social media now, but for niche DIYers, that participation is still a daily ritual.
• funnywish 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• stra1ghtarrow90 3mo ago
  poster must not have heard of letsrun.com
• boobtube 3mo ago
  Internet is now past 6 billion people. What % do you think know what a forum is? What % of television users know what a transistor is or even an antenna? What % of phone users know what a dial tone is or a party line? As time marches on people use technology differently. There is no going back. The users do not get to decide what they are going to use, that is for the producers to tell us. Bring on the new color TV I'm ready to be jacked in. Industry leads the way.
• PostOnce 3mo ago
  This post is timely, considering reddit is going to start requiring login for old.reddit.com which they announced in the past few days
• freitasm 3mo ago
  I run a forum site. It's been going on for 23 years now, and over that time, it has reflected the country's technology adoption history. We still have new signups every day and a community that helps others when needed - not only online but in real life too. The structured discussions and the focus on topics make this type of site a lot easier for some people when compared to platforms like Discord.
• m3nu 3mo ago
  Speaking of a crappy forum: I packaged phpbb for Docker because there was no good image after Bitnami went under. But not sure what to do with it. Didn't even put it on our hosting site yet. Is this useful for something beyond nostalgia and fun? https://github.com/pikapods/docker-phpbb/pkgs/container/docker-phpbb https://github.com/pikapods/docker-phpbb/pkgs/container/dock...
• DanielHall 3mo ago
  Making a fuss over nothing.
• pauly 3mo ago
  The thing that killed them for me was the evolution from this simple style that hn still uses to every post being a mini bio for the poster, with tagline and links. But even this objection seems ridiculously dated now.
• slopinthebag 3mo ago
  The bodybuilding.com misc forum was recently reincarnated. That was like my childhood man, legendary posts were forged on that platform. https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showthread.php?t=107926751 https://forum.obnoxiousbrutes.com/showthread.php?t=107926751
  • Vaslo 3mo ago
    This is a classic thread that never gets old
• VadimPR 3mo ago
  We still maintain phpbb forums, but activity on them is close to nil when compared to the Discord server. This is for a MUD client too, not exactly a mainstream audience!
• 30minAdayHN 3mo ago
  I think social media won purely because of the network effect. And once a huge amount of people hangout in one place, naturally, they would prefer to have all sort of discussions in the same place. I don't think world chose social media because it is better or anything. Social media was strongly business driven that adopted all sort of dark patterns to gather critical mass.
• davb 3mo ago
  I used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.
  • graemep 3mo ago
    Me too. They have huge advantages but you need to spend what Ofcom calls a negligible amount (not more than a few thousand) to set up and ideally set up a company to limit liability.
  • someonebaggy 3mo ago
    At some point surely we have to start openly defying the OSA and similar acts. What jury will convict someone for operating an online forum about sharks and not ensuring every user is older than 13?
    • drcongo 3mo ago
      I doubt that it's something that would ever get a jury trial - they'd have bankrupted you and taken everything you've got before it got to that. I also gave up running a couple of very niche forums when the OSA came in.
      • crimsoneer 3mo ago
        It's worth reflecting on the fact nobody has ever been arrested for running a forum under the online safety act. One forum, which was specifically dedicated to helping people commit suicide, was fined. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/27/suicide-forum-in-breach-of-online-safety-act-after-failing-to-block-uk-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/27/suicide-f...
  • crimsoneer 3mo ago
    Why? You are significantly more likely to be struck by lightning when out for a walk then prosecuted for running a forum under the online safety act. The act and guidance are very, very clear that your safeguards have to be proportionate to your scale and audience. If you're running a small forum, a quick "I sometimes check the posts and make sure nobody is using it to groom children or exchange child porn" is just fine.
• interstice 3mo ago
  My biggest problem with old forums was googling a question, clicking on a post of someone asking that question, and the first response being some gate keeper saying this has been answered so many times use the search function.
  • interstice 3mo ago
    Followed of course closely by someone asking a question and replying to themselves saying they figured it out. Though back then I was guilty of that one myself.
• parasti 3mo ago
  This made me realize that forums existed only because there was somebody willing to pay for domain, hosting and maintenance with money and time. As a result most had a bus factor of 1. All the forums I know died with their maintainer moving on - and even forums "resurrected" by a community member had that exact problem. There is space for a fully distributed forum that can't die with its maintainer.
  • account42 3mo ago
    I disagree. Part of what makes forums unique and worth visiting is having the right benevolent dictator at the helm, setting the tone for the forum. Larger forums already share the hosting and maintenance work among a group of people.
    • parasti 3mo ago
      What do you disagree with? Your third sentence disagrees with your second sentence, and I can't tell which part of my comment your first sentence disagrees with.
• mune2gu-chan 3mo ago
  I really miss the slower pace of those old, isolated forums. There was a unique kind of focus when your thoughts weren’t constantly competing with a global, real-time algorithmic feed.
  • xandrius 3mo ago
    Was that only the forums, the Internet, the world or maybe your age?
    • mune2gu-chan 3mo ago
      Probably a bit of everything. But I don't think it's only nostalgia. The design of those communities made it easier to stay focused on one conversation instead of constantly jumping to the next thing.
• ErroneousBosh 3mo ago
  I actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise. It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-) The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small. It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads. Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work. The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it. Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had). I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-) [1] https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb
• curtisblaine 3mo ago
  What are the open source, easily hostable forum platforms available in 2026? I remember I looked at the oss web-based self hosted chat platforms not long ago and I found they were all either abandoned or had crippling limitations if you didn't pay for the closed version. I wonder if that's the same for forums.
• gattr 3mo ago
  Good news, amateur astronomy is still done on web forums - they're the place for newcomers to acquire knowledge, and for technical discussions among the more advanced. (Modern social media tend to be rather used for outreach to the lay public.) Places like Cloudy Nights, Stargazers Lounge, Solarchat, and your country's biggest local-lang forum.
• IshKebab 3mo ago
  This is the most rose tinted thing I've ever seen. phpBB rightly has a reputation for being awful. In fairness it is possible to do old-school forums well, but the only example I have ever seen is the D language forum. https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ It's super fast, no signatures taking up 80% of the page. It does still have the "page 1 or 423" problem but I guess that wouldn't be too hard to fix. Apparently it even can be accessed via usenet clients. But please don't glorify awful phpBB shit.
  • iamnothere 3mo ago
    I agree that phpBB itself was awful, especially setting up mods and keeping everything patched, but the vibe at the time was great. That’s what people are nostalgic for. The Dlang forum software is truly excellent and I think more people should use it. Not sure why it doesn’t get more notice.
• _thisdot 3mo ago
  I wonder where people used to forums stand on Lemmy
• _the_inflator 3mo ago
  As someone who worked as forum member and even hosted his own very successful forum during the 2000-2015 years - it is so much work in a one sided system. It is a one to many relationship, where success in terms of forum quality and loyal members and member count are one thing, one bad apple another. Moderation and administration looks easy on the outside but the regular members don't see the amount of invisible staff forums, that mods and admins use to handle and balance day to day happiness or survivorship - administrators always do it wrong, all blame no thank you. I love and like forums and strictly stick to forum culture. If you can be polarizing here and there, like HN, I use it from time to time in polarizing topics. Strict rule: no flame wars, never. Most of the time I get support, which is ok, I don't troll. Most of the time I try to find common ground and add a story or information to a comment. Upvotes and downvotes show you the way. So maybe it sounds pathetic but a big shoutout to the mods here and all the die hard members who keep HN the best place in my opinion there is. Never change, and I mean it.
• divan 3mo 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!
  • willis936 3mo ago
    Discourse has been really nice for about a decade. I'd go as far to say that the remaining challenges are not technical.
    • divan 3mo ago
      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).
    • pelagicAustral 3mo ago
      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...
      • random_user_n1 3mo ago
        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.
• bsenftner 3mo ago
  Um... is not this place right here one of these crappy forums??
• sshine 3mo ago
  I miss the days when HTML injection bugs were considered a feature. The Internet was a lot more innocent before normies and money got involved.
• KaustubhKatdare 3mo ago
  AI can help find out answers to 'what the community thinks'. To extract knowledge from a forum; you don't have to read the entire forum.
• nephihaha 3mo ago
  I still use them. Just been on one.
• jongjong 3mo ago
  Great article. I think the problem though is that people changed, fundamentally. In the day of the crappy forum, people actually cared about interesting ideas, thoughts, experiments, community. You could join a forum and after a few months, the community would embrace you as one of their own and remember your username. Each user would have their own personality and they would bring a certain quality; humour, creativity, experience, wisdom, intellect... to discussions. Now with social media, you're just a consumer. If you share something, it feels like nobody sees your comment and nobody cares. If you don't have a lot of money and aren't famous, nobody cares what you have to say. No matter how interesting your life and career has been, your unique personality, humour, intellect, experiences; they're all worthless now. Social media became popular because people changed. Or at least, the average person online changed... But look at me, I'm using social media too and I don't go on forums anymore; clearly even I changed. Now only money matters and nothing else. Every person is judged purely through the lens of how much money they have and how much others approve of them. Intrinsic qualities have lost all their value.
• handoflixue 3mo ago
  It's fundamentally a problem of volume - forums work great for a small community of a few dozen people; the larger it gets, the harder it is to follow a thread as a dozen people are all replying to a dozen different sub-topics. But in a smaller group, it ensures everyone can follow those sub-topics and understand the overall state of the conversation. For a larger community, Reddit-style gives you a lot of quality sorting and makes it easier to handle spam by giving the community some ability to "downvote" unwelcome commentary. Eventually you hit the point where Reddit-style systems break down because they're large enough to attract karma farmers and/or collapse into an echo chamber. We haven't really figured out anything that scales well at that point beyond the Twitter/blogging style of "follow people whose opinions you respect" (the tradeoff there being that you're now mostly in a broadcast mode, rather than a reasonable back and forth, and the "broadcaster" is liable to be overwhelmed with repetitive comments)
• wazoox 3mo ago
  I miss nntp newsgroups :)
• shevy-java 3mo ago
  I still don't know why forums died. But, on a personal note, I also find it very tedious to register for a forum and then also use it. I accumulated more and more such log-in points and at some point I did not want to register for any more, as managing that became more and more of a hassle. I still use different webforums but I also dislike having to remember any log in, and I am also not using mega-sign-in options either such as "log in via google". Using such a system only makes Google more powerful, and then more evil and more greedy and I actually want to see Google removed totally rather than give it any more power. There has to be some kind of alternative. Discord is not, that's another private entity. I see how discord killed communities too.
• internet_points 3mo ago
  Quite a lot of my searches for practical advice (building, maintenance, event planning, shopping etc. etc) have the best hits from forums that on the face of it rarely seem relevant, e.g. forums for bmx bikers or moms etc. Old-school forums with real humans sharing real experiences.
• trashb 3mo ago
  Sadly Discord and to a certain extent Reddit is seen as a alternative for forums now a days. I like forums because it feels like a small community sure. But also because they are ACHIEVABLE! I can't count the amount of times that I was looking for a solution to a problem and I found it on a 7/10yo forum post.
• TrackerFF 3mo ago
  I'm still an active user in two different "crappy" old forums where the posts are shown in sequential order. Let me tell you one thing, after having used reddit/hackernews tree-like structure for years, it is hard - extremely hard - to go back to using the older types of forums. The problem is that they need very active moderation. It only takes two users to completely derail a thread, or clutter up everything. When you have two users that start arguing / discussing, it completely ruins the flow for everyone else. Also, jumping back and forth from page to page is annoying. That's the logistical aspect of it. Most older forums I used, seems to have migrated to facebook groups years ago.
• tannhaeuser 3mo ago
  Having witnessed forums languishing and closing down, and attempts to open up new ones with almost nobody signing up, I wonder if the reluctance of giving away credentials is a generational thing. It seems Lemmy-style/Piefed Reddit Fediverse alternatives are faring slightly better, not universally but at least for some topics and media-affine folks, though maybe they still just mostly gain from Reddit discontinuing its API and third-party app support.
• adrianwitaszak 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• ciefa 3mo ago
  [dead]
• chuckadams 3mo ago
  "Bring Back Crappy Forums", says a blog post without a discussion section.
• dranimalz 3mo ago
  Crap is literal. Many forums got taken over by people pushing products and services. The closest thing to the general topical discussions in BBSes and forums of old today are disparate social media rabbit holes gathering places. However, niche forums that just don’t have big audiences are still great; you just need to want to discuss something almost no one else cares about.
• thm 3mo ago
  https://flipso.com https://flipso.com does chronological + up/down voting but without nested comments.
• annagio_ 3mo ago
  Forums still exist in a small scale. Leaving reddit 3 years ago, I went down the road looking for forums, which I eventually found and today there is still some movement going on. The one I visit are forums like coffee making, satellite tv and so on.
• appreciatorBus 3mo ago
  > I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes. This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.
• IAmGraydon 3mo ago
  Forums are still a thing, just not as much as they used to be. Back in the late 90s to around 2012, I was a big participant in Harmony Central (musician forum centered around guitar), GearSlutz (now Gearspace), and KVR Audio. The latter two are still thriving and I'm sure HC would be as well if it weren't for a horrible "redesign" that drove all of the core users away.
• nunez 3mo ago
  Forums were popular when they were the only option for "social" media on the Internet. Much of that conversation moved into semi-private spaces like Facebook and Discord, and Reddit, by and large, rewards short, quippy, and throwaway discourse over the longer, more "passionate" posts that forums thrived on. This is what I lament the most. However, niche forums are still very much alive and well. Car forums in particular continue to be extremely popular, especially for enthusiasts. They're great for finding repair guides and advice that are extremely difficult to source otherwise. Shoot, even the Cybertruckies got a new forum that's doing well (though I believe it's from the same crew that owns teslamotorsclub.com, which is also doing well; in fact, I found a great thread on the founding of Tesla that had one of their pitch decks from before the Model S). Personally, I rely on houstonarchitecture.com to see what's being built in my area. It's not _super_ active --- it's heyday was definitely in the pre-Facebook era --- but new projects still get listed and discussed over. Definitely don't miss flamewars, though.
• RobotToaster 3mo ago
  some software can federate with lemmy these days, it's like the best of both worlds.
• subpixel 3mo ago
  The forums I keep an eye on have been bought by aggregators who redesign them for maximum ad-suck. It’s a shame bc very old threads contain massively valuable information and conversation on topics I care about. One of the best forums moved to a Google Group long ago and that’s maybe the best bad outcome.
• el3ctron 3mo ago
  i feel same good forum sensations on gemini BBS :) gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/
• silexia 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • krapp 3mo ago
    Moderators were able to kill posts and ban people on forums well before Reddit came along, that's kind of the whole point of moderators.
• jwr 3mo ago
  I also wish we brought back interesting discussions in a medium that is not corporate-controlled, but I do not long for those crappy forums. I always thought they were a major regression. We had Usenet, and it had easily filterable threaded conversations with a plethora of good readers. The only thing it lacked was good inline image support, but that could have been bolted on. Instead, we started implementing those terrible forums. The necessity to bookmark multiple forums if you wanted to participate in multiple discussions. Bugs, captchas... There were a ton of difficulties with accessing those. And, of course, you had to register for each one with a username and a password. The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will.
  • coldpie 3mo ago
    I guess the WWW itself is what you are asking for. You simply can't scale a single community to include all of humanity. You need some way to filter out abusers, and people will vary widely in where they want to place the line of what counts as acceptable behavior. Given that, you need some way to exclude people from spaces they aren't welcome in, and different discussion mediums in order to encourage or discourage types of behavior. This leads to different communities with different expectations of behavior, and that's exactly what we have on the WWW. Usenet worked because it was small, a very small percentage of the planet used Usenet.
  • razster 3mo ago
    I'm still connecting once in a while to a local (dialup)BBS that has been running since 1994, no growth but we're still keeping in touch. Same for a forum I frequent from time to time, since 2001. I've recently deactivated my IG, FB, and Reddit accounts, pretty much every mainstream social media platform. The censorship is beyond ridiculous.
  • cmacleod4 3mo ago
    "The internet today still does not have a good discussion medium like Usenet, and I am not sure if it ever will." Several web interfaces to Usenet exist, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sites_and_popularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . I operate one of these at https://newsgrouper.org/ https://newsgrouper.org/ . Many Usenet groups have been abandoned, or are haunted only by a few cranks, but a few still have worthwhile discussion. A couple of years ago there was a tidal wave of spam, but that mostly stopped after Google Groups disconnected. So the infrastructure is still there, still free of adverts and manipulative algorithms, just waiting for more people to use it.
• Venn1 3mo ago
  A couple of years back I was trying to search a project's Discord for help after they noped their forums. It was a bad enough experience that I set up a forum on my website that evening. I use it as a public version of Google Docs for issues I run across. I see a 1-2K requests from the Perplexity and ChatGPT-User user agents in the logs every day, so maybe it's helping out a couple of people. What's been amusing is the number of times I've been contacted on social media, Discord, email, YouTube, and even Steam asking for help / clarification on a post I made in the forums.
• hasteg 3mo ago
  Anyone here used to be on HackForums? I lived on there from 2011-2013/4... was pretty young back then but I learned so much and attribute it to getting to the spot i'm at now. I remember being so obsessed about "rep" on there, at one point I hit over 1k and it was like a huge achievement for me lol. Seems like that was the precursor to "followers" on X/Insta/whatever. Looking back, it wasn't the best place for a kid to be either, but seems I turned out fine. I really do miss forums and I have found myself looking for a new community like that to join lately.
  • doublepg23 3mo ago
    If I recall correctly, I was obsessed with the PBS show "Cyberchase" and had Googled the main antagonists name "Hacker" which lead to me HackForums. It ended up being a very significant influence on my computing career!
    • hasteg 3mo ago
      Haha that's a great intro to it. I remember very clearly I was obsessed with minecraft griefing/team Avolition at the time and found it to ask if someone could make me a hacked minecraft client for my first thread (yikes). Wasn't a great intro to the community for me but ended up staying after that. Also was very significant to my computing career, glad I was on it. I think that era of the internet was very special and I miss it dearly. Also seems like back in 2015 or something someone somehow got into my account and Omni deleted it. Sad.
• wiradikusuma 3mo ago
  I'm curious: how many Gen-Z (or younger) in your area know about online forums? In Jakarta, to my surprise, majority of kids aged < 25 had never heard of Reddit or Kaskus (which was the largest online forum in the country). I'm creating a forum (Discourse-based) and I have to tell them, "Like WhatsApp/Telegram groups" only then they understand what a "forum" is.
  • xboxnolifes 3mo ago
    I'd be a bit surprised if I met a frequently only, English speaking person who didnt know of reddit. Reddit moderator is still a fairly common meme insult. And im in communities with plenty of people under the age of 25.
• ktosobcy 3mo ago
  I'm still on one of those forums and find it very… comforting. The discussions and topics are (absurdly) in-depth. Poeple are actually interested in what they are commenting on and it's not too "crowdy" so you somewhat get to know more or less who is who :)
• lf-non 3mo ago
  Storyden is a nice self hostable forum solution if you are looking for something less crappy https://www.storyden.org/ https://www.storyden.org/
• mintflow 3mo ago
  This remind me of collegue life while enjoying on some Linux forums, good old days I always feel lost in social media those days, especially when X got bought by Elon Musk and premium users start to generate CONTENT(*) to get traffic and revenue Forums is just for some hobbist and it have didived content by channels(I almost forget what's the name) and have some highlight posts upvoted by users, that's really good stuffs How we get to this state I do not know, but a clear signal is that my classmate those days works on a startup that build app for forums by using some forum's API or customized solution, but seems mobile App goes fast and they lost the track, so perhaps forum get lost with emerge of Apps and user just stick to Apps and social media is also sort of Apps people get sticked(Addicted) to
• Arubis 3mo ago
  What killed forums wasn’t that they were crappy, or that Reddit exists, or that they were passé. They were killed by the combination of spam and regulation. Same reason Craigslist no longer has personals—we shifted the legal and labor burden onto operators, killing all the small ones.
• uproarchat 3mo ago
  I have very fond memories of PHPBB. A lot of tech communities migrated to Discord now, so that chat history is not indexable by search engines, which makes finding information a little tough. When building Uproar chat, to combat that "lost information" that is inherent to chats, we added a pin-to-feed feature so you can pin anything you said in chat to a publicly viewable feed, which is indexable by search. It's not as nostalgic or "great" as PHPBB was, but it's better than nothing.
• exabrial 3mo ago
  Bring back server side rendering that just farking worked. Loud sigh every time you visit yet another broken Javascriptastic fucking website. Looking at you: * statefarm.com * tmobile.com
• b3ing 3mo ago
  Spam prevention, moderation and security updates make running a forum require a lot of work
• husamia 3mo ago
  we need a new moderation system
• Minor49er 3mo ago
  Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe is a fun place to hang out online https://agoraroad.com/ https://agoraroad.com/
• waffletower 3mo ago
  I have flirted with the idea of returning to Slashdot, as I have noticed a few examples of suspect conflict-of-interest moderation occurring here on HN, given its y-combinator hosting; particularly with respect to posts related to prediction markets.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• qsxfthnkp2322 3mo ago
  The problem is discord and Facebook groups are not indexed so ai can’t search them.
• warumdarum 3mo ago
  Forums are good but should embrace hub and spoke. Hubs are central projects, topics, broad questions and hubs can have hubs for spokes. Spokes are the classic thread on a single question, detail.. and llm maps all communication per spoke into one huge wiki.
• tomeow 3mo ago
  [flagged]