It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely, with no good solutions popping up to replace them. I know they were/are incredibly prone to security issues, but they were good at one thing and one thing only: community.
I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article).
As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests.
(I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)
IMO Discourse is crap. I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced
Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
On top of that, discourse is a resource hog. You can run tens of twenties of phpBB forums on the hardware that's required to run one instance of discourse
> Something about the design of Discourse does not actually encourage discourse.
The UI is just not dense enough for me. Most of the screen is either empty or garbage. The forums of yesteryear had a much higher content/ui ratio.
They’re also full of bullshit gamification and immediately start spamming you with reminders if you forgot to disable it. Discourse annoys me as soon as I need to interact with it.
There's something /off/ about discourse that I can't put my finger on.
In the past (10-15 years ago) I remember using game forums (e.g., tribal wars, cs2d) and it didn't feel awful to use, even though I only had dial-up or 1mbps connection.
Today, some recent communities that I have visited using discourse are manjaro, elixir, purescript, and grim dawn. Across all of these I noticed that the initial time to render feels so slow, then the subsequent fetches using infinite scroll just sucks.
I've also visited some forums recently that do not use discourse, like the arch forum and some maplestory private server, and I don't feel the awfulness that discourse invokes.
For me the issue is that there's too much white space. I find the website uncomfortable to look at because the screen is mostly white and very little anything is visible.
I would liken it to the effect of being in a room with a very tall ceiling, it feels intimidating. This is why they built churches with high ceilings.
The website also gives me vibes of being a question and answer site like stack exchange, rather than a community.
Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?
It always appears to load significantly more data that it needs to, and does a horrible job at keeping your place. There's a reason books have page numbers and chapter numbers... without it, Discourse feels like a super long discussion that you just get lost in.
I do miss the old days of phpBB, SMF, and the others being everywhere all the time. It'd be nice to bring it back.
> Do you know why it's a resource hog? Is it the nature of Ruby (that appears to be what they use) vs php, or is it because it tries to be an SPA that has no pagination?
Ruby dev for 15 years here. Ruby is definitely slow, but in 2022 it's "tens of milliseconds to answer an HTTP request" slow.
They chose a javascript framework that turned out to be outrageously slow.
I found that my Discourse instance consistently took ~250 milliseconds to display the forum post list (according to the little box at the top left corner). After getting annoyed with Discourse, I went back to Invision Forum and I see about ~95 ms for the same thing, including sending the response to my browser.
Ruby is not necessarily more resource hogging than PHP, but the way typical ruby webapps deployed (all workers processes started immediately and left idling to wait for requests) leads to higher memory usage compared to low traffic PHP webapp (worker processes only started when requests is coming and shutdown afterwards, so you can host a lot of small traffics sites in a small server). If PHP webapps are deployed with similar process lifecycle, I imagine it would consume similar resources.
For medium and high traffic webapps, the difference is moot because you're going to end up with a large amount of worker processes to handle all those traffics anyway regardless of how you initially spawn them.
> I've never personally seen any discourse communities that are as thriving and active as the phpBB, SMF, VBulletin, forums they replaced
I think discoverability by search engines is very different from a forum. A better analogy to Discourse is IRC (or maybe Facebook groups). A better analogy to forums, is Reddit. Arguably the contemporaries are more feature rich, though becoming a little walled-in as time goes by.
I much prefer the rusty old phpBB UI over Discourse. It was clunky but usually it is an indicator of high quality community that's been run for many years and a bunch of gray beards hanging out having a good time. UI was just fine.
Throughout my time developing a competitor to Discourse, I've found that opinions are generally split 50-50 for and against pagination.
You can't really pick one method without alienating the other, but it is possible to allow the end user to choose.
Part of the hate is that IS is associated with endless scrolling. It needn't be that way if appropriate navigational tools are also implemented alongside an IS setup.
The issue with discourse is it isn’t infinite scroll. They break up the timeline into the right side and if you have an exceptionally long timeline it will skip time periods thinking you just want the original post and the new stuff.
It makes it difficult to follow the conversations.
This is correct. A problem with a sensible solution. When you scroll through NodeBB your address bar updates with the context of where you are. Copying that address will return you to where you were.
Likewise each post has a permalink in the timestamp. It will also return you to that post.
I do miss the old forums, but Discourse is pretty nice with Markdown formatting and its tagging system. Much better full-text search than the old-style forums too.
Hasn't been a problem for millions of people using PhpBB. Those things are nice but Discourse UI is disorienting for me. Threads don't feel like grouping of posts, they feel like search results. I like pagination and "staticness" of PhpBB, not a giant scrolling doomswheel that changes under you. The sticky header ensures that those pixels have private property rights and never ever move out of the way. I don't want to give up 80 vertical pixels for a Discourse logo.
Honestly, I am getting old or new UI's don't jive with me. I like borders and boxes. Old clunky things had clarity.
It has been a problem, that's why there aren't several million more phpbb users. Discourse is filling a niche that hasn't been filled. Slack and Discord aren't right, but unfortunately phpbb isn't it either.
1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread.
2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range.
3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads.
4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it.
It's not as awful as I would have suspected from the description, but I still don't really like it. Bar the fancy "scrollbar" timeline they give you to jump directly somewhere in the page - which does alleviate that problem I mentioned a little - it does feel exactly like infinite scrolling to me, I'm not sure where you're making the distinction between lazy loading and this. The content does physically appear later on the page, making the scrollbar jump around, which I heavily dislike. This renders the native scrollbar pretty much useless as a reference point.
The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.
Hmm... man I tried to like this stuff and used it with good faith. No idea why I don't like non-static UIs. I just want everything like a static page, almost like a physical analog piece of paper. Nothing moves. The monitor is like a loupe that I scan through on a giant canvas. I can empathize with people that like new fangled UIs, problem is with me.
It's not a competition, though. Nothing stopping a forum from having both features. A forum I'm on has the classic-style forum navigation as well as feeds, and customizable feeds at that. Each user can read through the forum in whatever fashion they like.
Thank you for posting that. In taking a second look, I do see a link about installing it yourself. Though given the section mentioning it on the pricing page is below the fold, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say they _encourage_ it. But it's good they have the option (and I did see info about vendors who also host)
My personal test for whether an open source company encourages self-hosting is whether any plans/pricing page advertises "Self hosting" in a parallel/equal way to how they advertise commercial offerings.
Having their free self hosting plan linked on their pricing page [1] is more than enough, ridiculous to expect companies should the devote the same valuable realestate promoting their free offering as their commercial products which sponsors development.
If they do, it just means that they're making more $$$ from you for providing that feature. Otherwise they're under-monetizing and all it tells you is that they don't have their pricing and growth strategy put together.
Here we go again. No, not every single decision (short-term or strategic) in a company is optimized only for $$$ at the expense of anything else. Nor should it, nor does that need to go against the interests of shareholders, nor is there any law mandating so.
Just like there exist companies who sell clothes not made in slave-like conditions even if they could legally get away with it and make more money by doing so.
In short: My argument is that it is possible (and should be expected) to be be ethically responsible without being fiscally irresponsible. This should be obvious.
Whats the performance of discourse compared to the mybbs or smfs of yesteryear. I heard it's very bloated? I've been meaning to self host some sort of forum software on a $5 vps fro some of my hobbies.
While I can't speak for Discourse (a sibling comment mentioned it working fine via docker image on 1GB), our standard for NodeBB is it has to install and run on DO's $5 droplet.
I could run phpBB just fine on my $5-10/mo shared hosting.
It's one thing I don't like about many new tools (Slack alternatives, a lot of ActivityPub stuff, etc) - they require a lot more resources than shared hosting can provide, so you need a VPS, and all the headaches that go along with it.
Community is good, but you can get that within a chat server, and there's something else massive that we've lost: searchability. Slack and Discord each have competent internal searches, after you've joined a particular server, but they're utter black boxes to the outer world.
I can point to several niches (mostly gaming, by inclination) where there is virtually no conversation outside of a Discord. Unless you find the appropriate server, you have no peers to share with, learn from. Even if you do find that server, you start running into structural problems for information sharing: Discord's only mechanisms for permanent content are a scrollable list of pinned messages, or admin-only archive channels. If you want to share a durable reference? I can't tell you how many times I've seen cobbled-together solutions, endless pins of shared Google Docs or imgur albums. RIP, wikis.
The wiki situation is really not helped by how wikia turned into fandom turned into a garbage fire. I am not even sure whether there are any active, thriving wikis on fandom any more. Maybe Wookieepedia but there are noises of moving that away, too. What they have done to that site can not be borne.
Man I hate what the Internet became. Once upon a time your Internet connection would have come with some hosting space that you could use to put up a wiki for your favorite show or whatever. Not any more. Now it's just a pipe to an endless series of people eager to give you a space to put your content that's framed with ads.
There isn't very much lock-in other than the domain names - Fandom wikis are all built on MediaWiki, and they have all of the MediaWiki export infrastructure (which exports everything about a page, including history) still intact last I checked.
Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).
Fandom's lockin is mainly not being able to migrate your community (they will ban you if you link to the new community) and having more SEO juice than you.
The fandoms for indie games (e.g. Papers, Please [0] and several others for less popular games) remain active, though not particularly curated. It's still nice to find some for particularly niche games, as some information (even if too opinionated or incomplete) is better than nothing for smaller games.
There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations).
There's probably more than you think -- they can just hard to find due to the shortcomings/user hostility of Google, as has been discussed here recently [0].
As a concrete example, searching for "Rabi-Ribi wiki" for info regarding a somewhat obscure 2016 Japanese platformer bubbles up the usual Fandom spam garbage to the very top, followed by a copycat site "PCGamingWiki", followed by more generic information such as its Wikipedia page. It's only if you get to the second half of the second page results that you'll find a link to RabiDB [1], which is extremely comprehensive, ad-free and documents pretty much every detail about the game.
In a similar vein regarding the original comment, there are a lot of forums with very active user bases that will never show up at the top of Google results. I still post in one regularly with ~300 daily active users who have all known each other for years, for the most part. We'd never show up anywhere near the first page of a Google search result, though, so we essentially don't exist on the modern internet. I imagine countless other forums are in the same boat.
What do you mean by PCGamingWiki being a "copycat site"? Copying who? It's always the go-to site I use to check various technical details on games and any tricks that can be done to improve shortcomings of especially older games.
I don't know that they are exceptions. The wikis for moderately popular but kinda niche games are often in good shape. For example, wikis for The Long Dark and the Kingdom series are two I've used in the recent past. Detailed information. Even the comments are good.
Both games are fairly popular within their spaces, but not mainstream or AAA.
Completely agree. Since I’ve enjoyed taking a look at some of the good community run wikis others have posted, I’ll shout out coppermind.net, a very useful tool when digging into the lore of Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe.
The more fragile presence of the information is actually a feature to some. If messages are more permanent and accessible, people can be more likely to stop and think before replying for more substantive discussion, instead of having a free-flowing conversation.
I generally also prefer forums that are searchable and public, but it's nice to have a real-time communication with someone over Discord (e.g. a couple sentences per message that gets responses, with some jokes sprinkled in). I think it's a lot easier to develop a one-to-one interaction or relationship with someone over Discord, versus forums structured like HN or Reddit.
Yes, but not for e.g technical help channels. I don't want a personal relationship with another user of xx OSS tool - I want to search for the error message and find previous answers.
Yes, this. I never really fell into the community aspect of forums but I gained a ton from the community existing. People were helping others and I could find it later.
Early 00s, when I was managing my own dedicated servers, never even read a book about it, but when I searched I’d find tutorial sites, forums where people talked shop/Q&A, the expert sex change site, blogs, the docs, etc. Now when I search something similar it’s pretty much ads and stack overflow. SO is good but at times I don’t like how it’s so strictly Q&A with no room to ask for opinions or to debate pros/cons on a lot of topics. I could probably do that on Reddit but I’ve long learned to just live without that.
People used email lists for everything, then forums for everything, subreddits for everything and companies are now using slack for everything. It is not in anyone's interest to educate users on picking communication tool for their purpose.
Would a public, searchable, aggregator w/chat instead of comments work? I've been building https://sqwok.im and I'm interested in learning how I could help solve these issues...
They were also more than a community. They became massive sources of niche information.
Often incredibly detailed, and incredibly specific to a niche (1980s BJ74 landcruisers in Canada, or Halo 2 mods for Soft modded xbox 360s, or pedal steel guitar - latest favourite)
Some of these still exist. But if they disappear the world will be worse off.
Thankfully some remain in the archive, but once they’re inactive you can’t just jump in and continue the thread.
Some have been going for 10+ years, sporadically. Real time communication is not required for a community. And it’s a really poor way to create information that will remain useful for years or decades to come.
Google seemed to discount forums at some point, and what filled the vacuum is not as valuable to the user.
Yeah - one thing I dislike about Reddit - it has eaten up all of the small forums and killed them. On one hand Reddit can be great but on the other hand sometimes you just want to discuss some niche stuff or hobby - and too much other crap will spillover from other subreddits sometimes to make that as useful
In what way does crap spillover from other subreddits? Are you talking about the new Reddit GUI (I use the old one) or mobile app (I use RedReader) spamming posts from other subreddits, or a more cultural aspect of site-wide conflicts?
It happens if a niche reddit has a popular post and makes it near the front page. Or, someone makes a post that gets the attention of one of the brigading subs(even if mods remove post as soon as they see it, it might be too late). Usually the sub will have an influx of low quality posts/shitposts for a while after that.
Also, not subreddit-subreddit, but multiplex times, posts of mine got reported to admins for hate speech because I said "retarder" in a mechanical focused subreddit, and I suppose they don't care to take the time to realize it's a perfectly fine piece of technology and not an ableist slur before sending out threats of banning you forever from the site.
Reddit has active communities of people who just repost other subreddits to laugh at, get outraged at, or bully. In theory the bullying and brigading is supposed to be moderated against but weakly moderated niche subreddits can sometimes find themselves under attack.
That rarely happened with phpBB but I don't know about Discord. That fact makes me feel a little old.
Sites for pointing at people and mocking them for being different have been with us much longer than Reddit. SomethingAwful. 4chan. LJDrama. alt.fan.warlord. The current main site in this space is Kiwifarms and I sure won't be sad if Cloudflare finally decides to stop protecting them from the DDOS consequences of their actions.
Bulletin boards with any kind of roadbump to registration could make it a bit harder for a bunch of atrocity tourists to start showing up and mocking someone directly but you sure couldn't stop them from screenshotting you and kicking you around on their board.
(okay alt.fan.warlord is maybe a bit of a stretch given that it was generally confined to only making fun of people's signature blocks, but...)
> I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident
I suspect this is one reason why forums died. Forums are places of muliti-paragraph well-structured posts. How many are uncomfortable with that? How many are even uncomfortable making a one sentence Slack or Discord post?
Forums could serve an important role in business documentation. Got a legacy project that nobody has touched for a decade? Imagine if years ago the developers had discussed things in forums instead of meetings.
Not gone at all! There are a bunch of companies working on the current generation of forums.
Discourse need not be the "golden child", the other ones are pushing the envelope of what makes a good community. Discourse often steals the good ideas from the other forums actually :)
e.g. NodeBB (https://NodeBB.org), Flarum, and Vanilla are three in the space.
(Admittedly, I maintain NodeBB, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt)
Some solutions apply, but solutions aren't necessarily the problem. In the past, running a forum wasn't that hard - get a server with PHP and a database and install your choice of tools. You could do it yourself or, depending on the size of the community, with a small set of volunteers. That still fundamentally works today.
However, in today's legal landscape I'm not interested in running any service involving user-generated content that's not guarded by an LLC and an army of lawyers. No technology can make a dent in the costs that affect my decision to run a forum or not.
> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely
May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.
The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.
In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
> The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. […] In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX.
Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.
> In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
I honestly prefer to see sites made by people who don't know how to design anything. The people who do know how to design websites seem to be either malicious or designing in the interest of some alien species from another dimension- see how bad Discourse looks, whitespace galore, too low density. Its modern polish is both its strength and its weakness.
Last activity and a (small) icon are valuable information. The icons visually distinguish users and "last seen" lets you know whether you are replying to a person or primarily replying for the benefit of the community. Also, distinct pagination means you have a stable location for each post instead of "scroll around until you see it".
I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.
Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures. They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more like a natural discussion that way.
rather ironic given that, in at least some instances i use, the primary mode of using slack (to the point that some members will complain if you violate it) is as a shitty forum. most discussions are segregated into threads; there isn't really much in channels other than the collection of initial messages that started a thread.
i despise this given that there's nothing like the bump mechanic in channels (threads with newer posts don't move to the top of a list, they just stay in their original chronological order), and in the thread view where there is, you can't keep threads uncompressed, there's no pagination for threads with 100s of messages, and finding individual threads is a chore because they're still not completely compressed.
Slack has the absolute worst implementation of threads that I've ever seen. There is one item that only tells you that some of the treads you're in have new messages.
The whole point of having multiple channels is so you can see at a glance which has unreads and check them if interested, isn't it? What use are threads if they're all hidden?
I have similar feelings, but FYI there's a checkbox when replying to a thread for "also post this comment to the channel" which I see used as a bump pretty often - that might help.
I don’t think the demise of classic forums/self-hosted communities is a technical problem. There is no shortage of modern communities - as you say, Discourse is one of the most popular. Otherwise there’s NodeBB, Flarum, etc - and vBulletin, IPB, phpbb, etc are still under active development.
The larger “problem” is the world has moved on. For its flaws, people seem to enjoy the familiarity/community of umbrella sites like Reddit.
I think https://twist.com/ is the best solution between chat and forum. But they have the same pricing slack now starts using and that makes it unusable to keep knowledge.
> Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident)
You can make multiple Discord accounts, each with their own set of connected servers; and Discord now supports a sort of "fast user switching" between said accounts.
There is 5GB limit for that offer. It's really low limit for any existing community. We end up asking for hosting sposorship from DigitalOcean and self-hosting Discourse there.
Yeah discourse SaaS owe us nothing, but their free offer is unfortunately very much useless for any existing community. And even with 50%-off 50$ is quite pricey for hobby non-profit open source project.
I recall spending a crazy amount of time refreshing the index on a site called TradeGamesNow (and to a lesser degree CheapAssGamer) waiting for new posts/comments. Now every site on the web either has a Subreddit (too much tertiary noise), Discord (I'm terrified of making a post on the wrong server by accident), or (to a lesser degree) Slack (limited features, as noted in the article).
As to the Slack announcement: I get that guests staying in your house for free eat not-free food. That being said, I have to imagine that Slack could offer a non-real-time updating experience (no polling, disable calls/video/file hosting) to cut down on costs (my assumption is that the active nature of the service is the biggest expense) and make it feasible for a free or $5/mo for X users & unlimited guests.
(I'm aware that Discourse was Supposed To Be The Chosen One, but at $100/mo and no self-hosting option (that I can see), I don't think it's even considered much. But I could be wrong.)