6 ms·

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 wa

by 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.
- IAmGraydon 3mo ago
  Discourse is not a forum any more than Reddit or Facebook is a forum.
  - bigstrat2003 3mo ago
    Discourse and Reddit are both forums. If you say they aren't, you're using a pretty idiosyncratic definition of forum.
- g-b-r 3mo ago
  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.
- realityfactchex 3mo ago
  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-browsers-in-july-2025/358131/6 https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...
  - K7PJP 3mo ago
    > 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.
  - The_President 3mo ago
    I bypassed their arbitrary "old browser" check with a javascript line that set a flag. Works flawlessly after that.
- AlienRobot 3mo ago
  I don't like Discourse because it's not paged. Infinite scrolling a thread just feels weird.
delis-thumbs-7e 3mo ago
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?
- pelagicAustral 3mo ago
  Yeah, you are absolutely right! I think this is my new weekend sesh... my brand new vBulletin...
  - vgeek 3mo ago
    Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?
    - pelagicAustral 3mo ago
      Sadly taken: https://github.com/rc5hack/yabb https://github.com/rc5hack/yabb
      - vgeek 3mo ago
        Hence the congruent capitalization in my post. :D
        egypturnash 3mo ago
        Yet Another Yet Another Bulletin Board.
- jasonjayr 3mo ago
  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.
marginalia_nu 3mo ago
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.
ksec 3mo ago
This. It was "the" reason behind 99% of forums shutting down or moving away to Discord. You have to upgrade it from time to time and upgrading is a non-trivial task. Which is why so many forums are stuck in version that is at least 10 years ago before they figure out it can't be upgraded easily. It was also expensive to run and doesn't really scale. The moment you grew beyond certain users, simply serving the site becomes expensive. And that is ignoring expensive functions like searching. Some site decided to outsource the search to Google. In the end forums died, free and better solution took over. And it is a sad. All the information in CGtalk would have worth a lot of money now had it been sold as data to AI companies. Now it is gone.
3dedb728-3f77 2mo ago
Do you think a simple java spring forum would work? It should be pretty simple to make actually...

by divan 3mo ago

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.
IAmGraydon 3mo ago
Discourse is not a forum any more than Reddit or Facebook is a forum.
- bigstrat2003 3mo ago
  Discourse and Reddit are both forums. If you say they aren't, you're using a pretty idiosyncratic definition of forum.
g-b-r 3mo ago
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.
realityfactchex 3mo ago
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-browsers-in-july-2025/358131/6 https://meta.discourse.org/t/dropping-ios-15-other-old-brows...
- K7PJP 3mo ago
  > 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.
- The_President 3mo ago
  I bypassed their arbitrary "old browser" check with a javascript line that set a flag. Works flawlessly after that.
AlienRobot 3mo ago
I don't like Discourse because it's not paged. Infinite scrolling a thread just feels weird.

delis-thumbs-7e 3mo ago

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?

pelagicAustral 3mo ago
Yeah, you are absolutely right! I think this is my new weekend sesh... my brand new vBulletin...
- vgeek 3mo ago
  Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?
  - pelagicAustral 3mo ago
    Sadly taken: https://github.com/rc5hack/yabb https://github.com/rc5hack/yabb
    - vgeek 3mo ago
      Hence the congruent capitalization in my post. :D
      - egypturnash 3mo ago
        Yet Another Yet Another Bulletin Board.
jasonjayr 3mo ago
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.

marginalia_nu 3mo ago

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.

ksec 3mo ago

This. It was "the" reason behind 99% of forums shutting down or moving away to Discord. You have to upgrade it from time to time and upgrading is a non-trivial task. Which is why so many forums are stuck in version that is at least 10 years ago before they figure out it can't be upgraded easily. It was also expensive to run and doesn't really scale. The moment you grew beyond certain users, simply serving the site becomes expensive. And that is ignoring expensive functions like searching. Some site decided to outsource the search to Google. In the end forums died, free and better solution took over. And it is a sad. All the information in CGtalk would have worth a lot of money now had it been sold as data to AI companies. Now it is gone.

3dedb728-3f77 2mo ago

Do you think a simple java spring forum would work? It should be pretty simple to make actually...