As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord.
Also, didn't vBulletin have a lot of spam and security issues? It's kind of like WordPress in that using it is nice but managing it is hell.
XenForo is where it's at. Never used IPB but heard they're slipping.
edit: e.g., https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universal...
Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side though... it was designed as a platform rather than a standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to use.
But the whole forum is web API first, and the web site is just a client. The docs are there to say "anything you see this website doing, you can do it through a client you create"... and it doesn't have to be everything, if all you want to do is list publicly visible new conversations on a different website then it's a single API call that you can do from client side JavaScript.
But... if you do want to create an entirely new application using the forum as a platform for it, i.e. a full blog system with the forum hidden but driving discussions, or an app where the forum is at the heart of it but the app looks like a cyclists ride database oriented around events and a calendar but with discussions per ride... well knock yourself out, the API makes that pretty easy and there are apps that do both of those things (though natch, they're closed source and the rides one charges over $200 per year per user for it).
I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.
People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
Hypothetically, If one were to offer something that was hosted and provided a trivial one-click sqlite export facility, would HN generally agree to participate in that sort of ecosystem? A public webhook could be exposed so that enterprising users could build their own replicas or other event-sourced systems on top... Account management would be simple and robust. PBKDF2 scheme over unconstrained passwords with optional 2nd factor of user's choice. All account facts aside from the primary key, email address, hash, salt and iteration count would reside in the public domain, so compliance with regs simply involves allowing the user to remove these items from the system. 1 simple button with a "are you sure" and that's that. The only traces are everything you knowingly placed in the public domain.
So, we are just talking about plaintext/markdown here, right? Hackernews comment-tier feature set, but threads stay around forever like reddit? This really doesn't seem like rocket science. Maybe add a tagging/labeling system like GitHub has so that users can quickly go lateral on related topics or comments?
I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. Keeping the tools heavily constrained and simple is the key to success here. Twitter is a good example of both. Look at the quality of conversation on HN. Arguably unparalleled as-is. What if these awesome conversation threads just kept going after the initial 24h? Wouldn't that be incredible?
That's cute. I thought the same back in 2014 when I started building forum software.
As it turns out, there's no one "perfect" feature set, and basic feature parity took far longer than I expected it to.
But I love reading about new entrants to the forum software scene... Do it! Give me a run for my money :)
"The master branch is considered a stable branch capable of being released at any time. Reviewed, stable changes land against master via pull-request."
Last update was jul 13.
It's pretty stable and has been around for a while, so i wouldn't expect a flurry of constant changes (durability and stability are exactly what i look for when self hosting)
answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let alone archived) by search engines
But yeah mostly, user-facing-wise, I agree.
Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.
e.g. for a refresher some random vbulletin site: https://forums.devx.com/forumdisplay.php?105-VB-Classic
Because each of those entries on that page are a thread to me, but if discussions within a thread go off on a tangent there's not really a way to group/organize those sub-threads.
I only see this as an issue if the site does not reimplement find so that it is able to deal with this.
In other words Discourse only has metrics on people who use Discourse.
I think this is probably why sign-up metrics are so common but those are perverse as well. How much do you set yourself back if you only work for people willing to sign up?
I don't mind them having a server-side search function that actually searches the entire thread. I do mind having a heavily-used shortcut hijacked to behave in a non-standard way.
I don't see the problem with this tbh. When you create a JS app, you lose a lot of the native features of the browser and it becomes your own responsibility to reimplement them in a correct way. As long as the site pulls it off flawlessly, this is ok to me.
And from what I have seen, discourse does do this well.
This is done to remain performant specifically when the website thinks infinite scrolling is a good idea. In my experience it very rarely is, with the Ctrl+F thing being just one of the reasons why.
Maybe it's that Discourse's search functionality didn't really work well, or suddenly started searching across threads rather than only the current one (IIRC); maybe it's that it's the only system I can think of (other than google docs) that hijacks the shortcut, but it gave me a very negative first impression of the tool.
I really like their timeline scrollbar as well which lets you easily move through hundreds of posts very quickly and has become a pattern in many apps like Google Photos and Telegram.
Let's look at Ctrl+F again. The standard Chrome search toolbar is search-as-you-type, highlighting occurrences immediately. It also shows the total number of occurences found on the page, and has arrows to navigate to next/previous. It also doesn't auto-hide (and thus lose focus) if you scroll the page.
What does Discourse replace it with? A search toolbar that requires an explicit submission to even start searching - and then, instead of actually scrolling to the occurrence of the search term, it shows a dropdown with snippets of posts in current scope that matched the term, highlighting it much like a search engine would.
So it basically has nothing to do with the native function that it hijacks, other than the broad concept of textual search.
I second the other comments, XenForo is the best currently.
Just can't guarantee it will be useful
Example of a long thread, just so we're all on the same page: https://meta.discourse.org/t/trading-buttons-buy-sell-exchan...
I can understand some hesitance from people who are naturally wary of infinite scrolling, as the vast majority of implementations are terrible. Where Discourse succeeds, though, is in managing state such that it doesn't feel brittle when you're deep into a thread's history. The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.
Maybe feature parity with classic pagination from 20 years ago. Discord takes forever to load content when scrolling.
There’s also a separate zulip-archive project that exports Zulip streams to static HTML: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive
[1]: https://lobste.rs
[2]: https://tade.link
[3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lis... for example
[5]: https://lemmy.ml/
Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load channels from each server.
As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than something like IRC.
Additionally, with NNTP, the "sign up" process is very low friction. With Discourse, I need to seek out each community separately. It's enough work where I'm unlikely to experiment with new communities.
The communities on Reddit is in my experience always lower quality, more combative and less friendly than communities on discord, discourse and irc.
Personally, I only have one Discourse instance I keep up to date on, but if that instance weren’t right there in my email client, I’d have zero.
edit: The main caveat in my experience is that you probably want to click through onto the website if you’re planning to reply, both to be able to preview formatting, and to double-check that the post you’re replying to hasn’t been edited in a way that renders the reply unnecessary. (I wish there was a way to deliver edits over email.) But most of the time I’m just reading, and for that I just stick to my email client. The loss of edits doesn’t seem to be a big deal in practice.
We really need a new NNTP, designed for p2p or federation.
Lemmy/ActivityPub or Briar are the closest thing we have.
It's amazing how quickly the software community forget lessons from the past.
Personally, I love that Discourse allows j/k for keyboard navigation. I get the hate over infinite scrolling. I feel mixed over the two approaches.
https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/vbulletin-5-connect/vbulle...
That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for when viewing later.
Discourse has the advantage that it is indexable by Google which is a big one, but I don't share the frustrations that many here talk about.
IM has always felt faster and more responsive than forums ever did. I used to be a huge forum user and I remember posting questions and having to wait at least a day to get to an answer while on IMs I have often found people start to help out immediately and provide their best guess even when they don't have the full answer.
While forums felt too formal and if you didn't post a well researched and correct question, your post would immediately be locked/flamed/sunk down.
Discord and Slack both fulfill interesting niches, but everything else is composed of chewing gum and tape.
The closest thing is Reddit, but it’s not great because subreddit names can be taken over and it’s hard to topple moderators that refuse to give up power.
The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today.
We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software to really make it the best offering out there
I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :)
On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunch I can get stuck in a state where all my history is just the one thread I clicked into. Not totally sure what is going on here, but feels like the type of thing that shows up with manual JS page history management failing to handle rapid events quickly leading to race conditions.
Definitely some papercuts with that system that I'd be happy to spend some time optimizing. I'll probably file a bug and look into it this week.
Don't worry about being mean, if we didn't know how to take criticism, we would've gotten out of this game a long time ago. Every bug report (no matter how pedantic) ends up improving the software as a whole, and that ends up with everybody winning
Shoot me an email at support@, and I'll give you some pointers. If you want us to do it, we can do that too.