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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to try and fire something up this week. I’ll do some research on software for it, I’m fine spending money on xenforo or vbulletin but it looks like there are quite a few options out there.

I’ll announce it here when it’s ready!

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Use Discourse. It's not only the most advanced from a tech perspective, but it also aims to promote strong communities.

No doubt that discourse is really nice software, and I will give it a go, but it does lack the “nostalgia” referred to by the original comment I replied to with this idea. All options are valid at this point though!

I am a huge fan of Simple Machine Forums

- https://www.simplemachines.org/

Am I the only one who is totally confused by discourse?

Maybe it's because rhe demo instance was reset way to often or something but I've never really seen a really working discourse instance. (I think both Mozilla and Canonical (has?) run one but they weren't to active either IIRC.

Anyone has examples of a working discourse community?

I think https://purescript-users.ml is running on Discourse. It's quite young though.

- https://discourse.mozilla.org/latest

- https://platform.github.community/latest

- https://forum.golangbridge.org/

Thanks everyone. You've convinced me that discourse can work :-)

The subject matter may not appeal to some on HN, but here's an installation I set up at a previous employer over three years ago, that is thriving: https://discourse.biologos.org/

Heh, I've recognized that feeling too but I feel HN is still one of the most reasonable foras I know of.

I think it is important to curate it, but I applaud the idea. I would say; only allow people with over a certain karma score on HN (>1000)? That way you benefit from the quite strict moderation here.

But indeed I remember the days on vBulletin forums; all my remarks against ‘you cannot make friends over 30’ that I uttered here come from there: most my current friends and one of my best friends I met on forums. It just worked well.

Now it sounds more like an elitist club. Weren’t most of forums free for all?

most, but one of the best ("most influential on internet culture", maybe?) had a 10$ entry fee

Free for a heavily selected group of people with internet access and specialist knowledge of how to find stuff. So: elitist in a sense of resources weighted by interest.

Yes, but there were only a few people around and they were tech savvy and often entrepreneural especially in tech forums... Now when a forum gets any sort of uptake, it is jumped on by marketers and other spammers. So elitist, I guess but it was automatically back then I guess.

Good moderation feels like a better solution than invites or elitism here. Have the forum open to anyone, but be ruthless when it comes to removing low quality content or marketing spam in any form. Maybe even set things like signature links or certain aspects of the post formatting to be only accessible to those with 5 or more posts, and have any first post with a link in sent for moderator approval.

Human moderation always wins out over technical solutions and elitism.

Not to mention the social shaming of people trying to sell things is always pretty scathing on forums. In general they tended to promote good content by liberal application of both the carrot and the stick. No one wants their product associated with a 17 page thread about how product X is sold by a bunch of annoying spammers, oh and by the way for anyone interested, turns out CEO of the company shilling this product has a kink.com account looking for a strong domme in the SF area to punish him :thinking_emoji:

I think to kick things off it will be best to allow anyone to sign up and potentially lock it down in the future if things get out of hand. Usually forums have features like limiting new thread creation to users with enough karma/comments, so that can help a bit in keeping quality up.

Drop me an email if you need help anyway. I tried many existing options and have not found any good so far.

Thanks!

Here it is! https://hackerforums.co/

Dude, I've been on reddit since 2006 and I don't even have 1000 karma. Don't exclude the lurkers! (Who are too busy programming to post.)

Maybe you are right but how to prevent it from becoming a sales/recruitement/troll/showoff fest again?

I think that's what mods are for. At least back in the day that's how it worked. Of course some mods will abuse their powers and just do stupid stuff but in the end that's part of what made it so fun. You had to iterate through dozens of forums and hope that yours had a fighting chance because the mods did their job properly.

Normal forums have categories for these things.

Maybe except trolling.

Exactly that. I would explicitly allow it, esp since most have some interest in some of the topics. Even off-topic chat can be fine if it's in an extra category. The only thing to avoid is pure spam but with some threshold to sign up (e.g. verification) that can be kept relatively low.

A good thing of forums is that you get everything as is. As raw as it gets. If you don't like something or someone you just block it.

You can also have privileged threads/subforums that are read only if you don't meet some requierments.

You can even have an option to only show comments/posts for users with karma > N, if thats what you want.

I wouldn't set the karma threshold that high. If you want to avoid spammers, a threshold of 50-100 is likely enough. That excludes any cheap spamming attempts.

Second vote for discourse!

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