Ask HN: Where have all the forums gone? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where have all the forums gone?

116 pointslegrande109 comments

It used to be everyone had their own phpBB or vBulletin forum for discussion on niche topics and it was a sort of proto-social-media where you had the ability to 'like' or 'star' posts, build up friends and followers, etc. All tools which are now the staple of social media.

But lately I've noticed a lack of these forums in search results. It used to be in the good ol' days you would search for a topic and some forum would discuss it at length, with hundreds of comments, and then the topic got locked as the issue was resolved.

I still see forums in search results, but they're mostly old-timer forums which have sufficient funding and a credible userbase, and are staying regardless.

Did social media absorb these forums? Did messenger apps absorb them? Did Discord absorb them? Did Reddit absorb them?

Where's have all the forums gone?

View on HN

I would say Reddit, more so than any other of the potential replacements you mentioned, has taken on the role of hosting topic-based discussion which used to be the domain of forums.

It's part of the relentless push toward greater resource allocation efficiency. Just as it is orders of magnitude more efficient to distribute perishable goods through a centralized corporate supermarket chain rather than a patchwork of independent corner markets, Reddit reduces the total amount of operations overhead that once went in to maintaining thousands of independent vBulletin / phpBB / Discourse instances in the aggregate.

With all the recent talk about supply chain resilience and the inherent trade-offs necessary to improve it, one might wonder whether such considerations might be weighed differently going forward.

In addition: From a users perspective having one account for reddit which replaces x accounts for specialized forums makes things easier such as managing notifications, etc.

These centralized sites makes it easier to stick around.

That forum I signed up for in 2012? I don’t remember the name.

That Facebook group I joined in 2012? I still see the occasional post in the feed.

Also it’s vastly easier to find these communities in the first place. There’s no way to look for forums about a specific topic, if that exists at all.

> From a users perspective having one account for reddit which replaces x accounts for specialized forums makes things easier such as managing notifications, etc.

Forum platforms could offer the same feature by interoperating with the Fediverse. You can sign up on one server and use that one identity to post content elsewhere. (Plus it also addresses the issue of needing a mobile native UX, there's plenty of apps that can interact with the Fediverse.)

Could, yes, but that's besides the point of WHY this has happened

Because the Fediverse is quite new and forums haven't gotten around to adopting it, even though they would naturally benefit from this tech.

Notifications are just one aspect. As mentioned by others discoverability is another. An independent forum has to compete with commercial sites and well the entire www regarding search engine placement to be found.

That said, a lot of communities seem to be migrating to Discord as well, which has a discoverability many times worse than forums, as Discord 'servers' are not even publicly accessible.

Also I would not underestimate the power of push notifications. Forums don't come with their own app and notifications out of the box.

I loved forums because they used to be much smaller than subreddits. Also, for me forums UX was much better. Big trees of comments hard to follow.

What I enjoy about forums is that everyone can have their 100 vertical pixels to say something in a certain topic, and that gives it a feel of "contributing to the conversation" to the whole thing.

You can just say "I also have these headphones and love them" and that adds value to the whole thing.

Maybe its just a factor of being small like you said.

In reddit/hn/twitter one feels ignored most of the time - no upvotes and feel like no one has read what you typed. Why did you even type it?

(I know this is the issue with forums that reddit-style sites fix...)

I was an admin on a forum for a sports management game (Championship Manager /Football Manager) for ~20 years and for us the 'death' came from Steam Community/Workshop, Reddit, Twitter, and Discord.

Visitor numbers always remained pretty high (People coming to the site to download resources etc.) but people were just less likely to contribute with posts as they had other places to use as a community instead.

Here's the number of posts for each yearly release of the game...

  - 2009: 110,000 posts
  - 2010: 273,000 posts
  - 2011: 280,000 posts
  - 2012: 188,000 posts
  - 2013: 196,000 posts
  - 2014: 180,000 posts
  - 2015: 159,000 posts
  - 2016:  96,000 posts
  - 2017:  50,000 posts
  - 2018:  32,000 posts
  - 2019:  21,000 posts
  - 2020:  24,000 posts
  - 2021:  17,000 posts

this is sad. I miss the old forums, much better than today's "all at once" social medias with the endless stream of random content in the feed.

Wow. The numbers really speak volumes. Thank you for sharing this so candidly.

I was a moderator on a bunch of forums about 20 years. There was a whole network of them, about 10 or so. All the guys who ran the various ones were friendly with each other and helped out moderating each others boards. Every single one of them shut down as Facebook took over. I made a Facebook group to preserve some of the membership of the finial one that shut down. We had spoken via that forum nearly every day for over a decade. Facebook just wasn't the same. There were rarely any posts and it basically died out completely. Some of it could have been due to age and people just having other priorities in their lives, but I don't know how much a role that really played. I know people through there who I saw meet their now wife, have kids, and now the kids are driving. It's weird.

I much preferred those forums to what we have now with social media and places like Reddit. With the forum I knew all the main posters, while now everyone is basically a stranger good for one short conversation.

What type of hobby or interest?

It was a bit of a variety. The main hub in the early days seemed to be around multimedia stuff and tech. The guy who ran it was into doing flash stuff and had a media company (still does). However it was mostly general chat or "look at this cool thing" type stuff. Slightly before my time there, it seemed like they had a feud with the Rogan forums; there was some drama and history there.

Off that I remember a couple guys had ones for web models (one of the guys ran the Kate's hoof site when that blew up, if you remember it). Another was software leaks, which was shutdown after a scare from Microsoft's lawyers. Another had a pretty big fitness section on it. Some others were mostly general chat... just shooting the shit, but skewed to different tones, if that makes sense. One guy dropped out of seminary school and had a site documenting all the stuff in the bible that made him stop believing in god, which was pretty interesting... he was also really into making flash audio players.

Toward the end it was a lot of people just sharing stuff they were doing... one girl was a researcher or something who was always posting pics in the jungle with giant gorillas. Another guy was just some punk college kid, but ended up in the military, working in the Obama white house, and is now a lawyer; it was cool watching that progression. People met their husband/wife, had kids. Parents died and they were dealing with how to clean up their house. All kind of stuff. There was always an area for tech support or PC builds, things of that nature. One guy lived an hour from me, I've been to his house a come times. I got invited to another guy's wedding from there, but had a conflict. It was just a little community of people on the internet. The original hub site was pretty big, I want to say 70k members. The last one to shut down was a lot smaller, but we all liked it the way. There were probably 1-2 dozen of us who were there almost every day. It was extremely active... until it wasn't.

The only guy I know who is still running one is for saltwater fish tanks. I'm a mod over there, but don't think I've been there in over a year. I helped him when he was getting things setup, tweaked the logo he got form 99Designs, because it wasn't quite what he needed for all the areas, worked with him on testing various feature of the new boards, small stuff like that. They are pretty focused on their fish. There are meetups for coral and stuff like that.

Oh man, where to begin. The decline of forums isn't due to one factor, but it's due to a combination of mutually-reinforcing factors:

1) Losing users to social media. Forums were a place to meet people and socialize, now twitter/facebook/instagram fill that niche and do it more expertly.

2) Losing users to chat apps. Forums were a social space for friends once upon a time, now whatsapp/snapchat/discord are where people talk to friends.

3) Aging GUIs. Most forums have outdated GUIs which improperly scale to modern displays. They're either too compact (for an 1024*768 era), or they made a failed attempt at modernization and it looks terrible.

4) Consolidation of forum hosting. Tapatalk bought every popular free forum hosting provider (such as invision) and forced everyone to create a new "tapatalk" account to continue using the existing forums. Then they forced everyone to convert their forum to a new GUI (which was questionable at best). They pestered forum owners to pay up. They pestered forum owners to beg their community for money by adding a donation badge.

5) VPS providers suck now. AWS has drunk their milkshake, they're fighting over scraps that fall from the table. (For those who don't know, VPS means a cloud provider that typically provides a managed PHP environment with a preconfigured PHP app, such as an open-source forum software).

6) Barrier to entry in the modern computing world. You can't just launch a forum provider in 2022, you need to have both an iOS and an Android app, and they need to be as good as Discord. Your forum also needs to load on desktops with varying screen resolutions, from iPads which are essentially retro 800x600 displays, to 4k monitors on laptops and desktops.

You can see how these things all feed into one another. Forum hosting providers were eaten up by the likes of Tapatalk because the margins got so low, only a big fish could capture enough revenue to survive. Open-source projects fell apart because the VPS providers couldn't afford to contribute code to them anymore. People left for apps and social media because forums started to get worse. Etc.

Agree with everything here, and I'll also add that spam was a major problem for the simpler forums. It takes a lot of effort to combat, (at least until Google's recaptcha) and some forums stopped accepting new users from the public. Adding recaptcha requires a programmer, and not all forums have one. I joined one classic-style forum in the last 5 years and it required sending a email to the admin to add my account by hand. It also didn't have SSL...

> VPS means a cloud provider that typically provides a managed PHP environment with a preconfigured PHP app

My understanding of VPSes were that they were typically unmanaged - similar to a dedicated server in usage but which was actually running on hardware that also handled several other VPSes. I actually still use one today.

Am I misunderstanding?

You are correct. I think what the parent post means to refer to is 'managed/web hosting' where the provider provides a set up install of a web server (and in many cases cpanel access)

VPS: customer has root on a virtual server, usually sharing the hardware. Customer is responsible for all upgrades.

The parent post is referring to what I would call shared hosting, with no root access. The customer is not responsible for base server upgrades.

Tapatalk strikes me as a brilliant idea ruined. I’m surprised nothing else came along to successfully bridge forums to mobile culture.

In the long-term war of attrition on forums, an early consolidator was Ning from Marc Andreessen, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_(website)

We have a selfhosted Forum based on WoltLab for our Community. It's a (one time) Paid Forum-Software (110$), which is based on PHP and easy extendable. Right now we're having 141k Members and 120k Posts in 5 Years, so i would say our Forum is quite active. There is no App, but the Design is really good, fully responsible and can be used on a Phone without a problem.

> 3) Aging GUIs. Most forums have outdated GUIs which improperly scale to modern displays. They're either too compact (for an 1024*768 era), or they made a failed attempt at modernization and it looks terrible.

This is kind of paradox to me. Yes, changing UI can help attracting new users. However in my experience, changing UI will definitely upset frequent users (for eg reddit) and some of the forums that I frequently visited have this problem so much so some of them are abandoned because of this reason.

True, I guess I really meant UI scale. These old forum GUIs are fine, they just need to be upscaled. Some websites like Twitter allow you to scale the entire GUI in user preferences. The problem with open-source forum GUIs is instead of re-scaling the GUI, they try to redesign the GUI based on a misunderstanding of modern design language.

Forum-based communities could be compiled into a Brave Goggle filterlist for search upranking. Please add to the list!

Model shipbuilding: https://modelshipworld.com/

Model engineering: https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/forums/

Woodworking forums: https://www.lumberjocks.com/forums

Metalworking and woodworking: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/

Locks, doors, safes and physical security: https://www.lockpicking101.com/

General IT community: https://community.spiceworks.com/

List of tech forums: https://github.com/learn-anything/forums

>General IT community: https://community.spiceworks.com/

I dont see any forums there, just a company making money as a middle man? EIDT: found it hiding under "ACTIVE GROUPS THIS WEEK" somewhere at the bottom, terrible interface, but I see the utility.

Obvious ones:

IT stackexchange

electronics https://www.eevblog.com/forum/

hobby vintage computing https://www.vogons.org https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php https://eab.abime.net https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/

In general technical topics have a higher chance of having a dedicated community run old school forums, while less technical ones tend to concentrate around social media.

> less technical ones tend to concentrate around social media.

Sadly very true. There were some early online communities for digital photography.

I really like phpBB-style forums. They've a really rich heritage, and they load in a second. My typical workflow for finding discussions on almost any topic (in the English-speaking interent) is something like:

1. search HN (either via Google or Algolia)

2. search any of the oldschool forums via Duckduckgo or Google with the 'site:' operator

3. search reddit (teddit.net actually) via Google or DDG

Some favorite forums:

DOS ain't dead: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board.php

Pro audio geeks: https://www.gearslutz.com/board

Taperssection: https://taperssection.com

Keyboard geeks: https://geekhack.org

Thinkpad geeks: https://forum.thinkpads.com

Woodworking: http://www.sawmillcreek.org

Meditation techniques: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/home

Unix and BSD geeks: https://nixers.net

Green building: http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum

Perl monastery: https://www.perlmonks.org

Not to mention forums for different Linux distros, like the Arch forum.

We need an endpoint search client that can be customized to implement user-defined search workflows like the one you described, with dedupe of results and context-specific ranking. Perhaps a customized Recoll instance, https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/.

There are still many independent forums. I think the issue is that search engines stopped indexing or preferring them in favor of the bigger centralized sites. My own theory of which I have absolutely zero data to back it up is that the bigger platforms are safer for search engines to link to as they likely agree to the same censorship as the search engines participate in. It's just a theory. It could be something as simple as the bigger platforms are more popular so they are preferred.

Thank you for bringing this up. I’m amazed that this is not being discussed more. Search engines just stopped showing forum results. I would argue this is one of the main reasons people feel that forums have disappeared.

I also agree with your theory about censorship being the likely cause. Control over internet content has silently moved to a few companies.

Brave Googles (user-defined search ranking filters with Adblock syntax) can address this, but we need to maintain a github or other group-editable list of forums.

Brave Goggles: https://search.brave.com/help/goggles

wow this is interesting. I wonder how many people use it? I have brave but I had to switch back to Google after 2/3 searches weren't as good as Google. (but to be fair 1/3 are actually the same or even better than Google's bias...)

Bigger platforms advertise on Google and have all kinds of partnerships.

Some podunk vBulletin? Might as well not exist, as far as Google is concerned. Makes zero difference to their bottom line.

Yeah in SEO it's widely known forums are easy to outrank

It's because the content is usually shorter and less in-depth than a blog post. It will also contain unhelpful posts mixed in with helpful posts so the user experience is not always great

Imagine a question followed by 1kb of HTML containing a username, avatar, signature etc just to contain the words "I'm also having this problem" or a meme. Sure 20kb of HTML later maybe somebody gave a helpful reply but it's just noise. Now compare that to a properly crafted blog post. What do you think Google will choose?

Google will choose shoddily-generated blogspam of no use to anyone and I will append "reddit" to my query, doubly ruling out small forums.

Reddit is one of the forums I was referring to in my comment. It's very easy to outrank because as it turns out it provides a poor UX and has a lot of noise.

But yes I too sometimes search out reddit results if I'm looking for different opinions for example

I used to help run a few vbulletin forums, customising the code and doing admin stuff.

One of those that survive, the forum still exists (https://www.sau.com.au/forums/). It's a very specific, niche, technical forum, where owners of Nissan Skylines socialised, asked technical questions and traded.

Facebook Marketplace/eBay etc cannibalised the trading. This meant sponsors of the forum who helped pay the hosting bills slowly reduced.

Social banter moved to Facebook Groups (often more localised geographically... in its heyday in the late 90's and early 2000's the forum had people from all over the world socialising around the clock)

Which means technical Q&A is the main drawcard now, and is the most active component of the forum outside of the diehard "oldschool crew" who keep the social parts active. I expected reddit to cannibalise the technical Q&A, but it hasn't as forums present a combination of threaded conversation and blog style updates from the OP or groups of contributors.

As an SAU member for almost 20 years, the site is a shadow of its former self. The technical areas tend to be very much a ghost town, with link-rot setting in pretty hard (broken images that were once hosted on imageshack or Photobucket for example really hurt the quality of many of the DIY guides etc). The social areas are mainly a handful of as you say the "old-school crew", but nothing like "back in the day". Other than a handful of motorsport/trackday events each year, the 'club events', especially the 'social' type like cruises and meetups, are almost non-existent. I'm not sure if that's because those events tend to now be organised over social media in smaller circles, or if they just don't happen.

In short, there's just not really much attracting new (or existing, evidently) users to the forum these days. I'd say it's a classic catch-22... people don't frequent the forums so the content (and experience) suffers, and then people don't want to frequent the forums because the content and experience aren't that great any more.

People forget that google ad network banned forums (maybe they still do?). In our current heavily commercialised internet landscape people simply moved onto more profitable endeavours.

Perhaps someone who understands the ad industry can help me understand it a bit better. Does Google ban forums because there's simply too much inventory around otherwise?

I realise the stated reason will be that it can be unpredictable what people might say on forums and such, but that doesn't feel like the "real" motivation. Any user generated content (eg. comment sections on articles) could result in ads being placed alongside unsavoury content.

https://gathering.tweakers.net (mainly tech but also general discussion) is still huge in the Netherlands. And https://boards.ie (general) is in Ireland. In Spain I know https://forocoches.com (cars) is big. https://xda-developers.com is the absolute authority on Android ROMs. They're not all gone.

The time that everyone started a forum is gone. Many smaller ones have shut down. But some are still thriving.

> Did social media absorb these forums? Did messenger apps absorb them? Did Discord absorb them? Did Reddit absorb them?

Yes to all four.

The classic forum experience (I'm talking phpBB2 and similar) is incompatible with the dynamic UI/UX the modern web audience expects. The lack of comments being formatted as a tree is likely a deal breaker on its own.

Its funny, because I cannot stand the style of discussion that comes from hivemind upvoting and reordering of comments by vote count, ala reddit.

Give me threaded discussion that is chronological, with the ability to quote previous posts.

I am so tired of the top several comment trees on reddit being the latest hivemind digested and regurgitated funny reply.

You can't stand hackernews? ;)

HN is the exception, thanks to the mature and thoughtful discussions. Notably, it is absent the hordes of "r/unexpected_letterkenny????!!?!?!" and the like that really grind my gears.

Does HN rank posts only by the number of points a post receives?

I don't see reordering comments except on Hacker News

Reddit's always in chronological order when I view it

IMO, a chronological view breaks down when you reach the critical mass that is reddit. Anything that hits the front page is going to have hundreds of top-level comments. You'll have tons of garbage to sift through.

But if you want it, reddit DOES let you sort the tree in chronological order.

> with the ability to quote previous posts.

What do you mean? You can do this by just copy/pasting.

Thinking back to phpBB or Vbulletin, where it'll nest the quote inside your post usually in a text box. I think reddit can do something similar but I don't know how.

Compare that to the admittedly clumsy method of c/p and lead with a '>' here on HN.

For an advocate for maintaining ones own 'sovereignty' by relying less on centralised services I think forums have been assimilated by modern social media (Facebook Groups, subreddits) and crude attempts by IM apps to emulate forum threads (Discord, Slack).

Fondly remember when those ad-filled 'free forum hosts' were shunned by anyone serious who would get a domain and private server instead. In some ways it feels like we are potentially back at the same situation but in reverse.

Considering traditional forum software like phpBB, vbulletin and similar largely look and work the same as they did 15 years ago not hard to see why some change is desired particularly with accessibility by mobile-users.

Mobile support is the biggest feature for me. I'm surprised how many forums don't simply do width:90% and such with the comment field. I'm only on a PC at work, so that leaves out forums for socializing.

A lot of the remaining forums just don't play well with Reddit/FB. Things like a specific community or game. Things with some quality control (also including Something Awful). Or places like 4chan. Though out of all of these, I'm surprised that 4chan/8chan users have set up a colony on Facebook, but they don't expect to stay there.

I think Discord has some places of interest but there seems to be a very high barrier to joining unknown servers, unlike IRC.

Reddit and Facebook killed off forums but haven't come close to replacing them.

I had a PHPBB in 199X for a small group of friends / club. It would frequently get hacked or spammed if you didn't update patches and monitor it quite closely which was annoying. Most of the forums I use (apart from this one) have moved to Facebook which is awful in terms of searching historical posts, but okish for small realtime groups and 0 cost/work. Reddit was good of course but not it's kind of annoying. Usenet was big when I had my own site. There are still a few custom built forums that I frequent as well. Please don't say Twitter...

Forums still exist, even reddit and co sucked some up. A interesting question would be, if the degrading google search is responsible that it is harder nowdays to find them

>A interesting question would be, if the degrading google search is responsible that it is harder nowdays to find them

I was going to comment on this. Forums are probably cropping up at a faster pace than ever (its never been easier to host a forum, and we have modern forum software like discourse readily available), its just near impossible to discover them through modern search. Forums, for example, often have long running threads that may span over multiple years with rich sources of useful information, but modern search heavily downranks old (read: less than 1 week) pages unless its a niche query and hosted on $TOP_10K_SITES.

It's super slow to contribute to a forum and the paged-thread format lost out to comment trees. It can be a bit of a nightmare to follow long threads.

Kinda wish some more went away, I still know where to find some silly comments I made in my youth.

Whirlpool still going strong in aus.

people didn't want to pay to maintain the sites, so they sort of died out largely (lots still around but not like it used to be) and many of the users moved to:

1) Reddit 2) Facebook 3) Discord

Lots of them just disappeared and never 're-appeared' anywhere, as the interest in paying to maintain them just died out.

Personally I prefer reddit to the other 2, as its searchable, but overall the web feels a lot less rich than it did when forums were more popular and niche knowledge seemed more common without onerous reddit/facebook/discord moderating.

There are still plenty of forums out there from what I've seen. I'm a participant in forums related to mountain biking, fishing, guns, electronics, etc., etc. Now to be fair, some of them aren't as active as they used to be (the fishing one stands out in this regard), but there are still people who post and participate for sure.

This site says it links to 1700+ forums. Seems to be experienced and fairly-well organized. Recognizes 'niches' up-front.

https://www.findaforum.net/

'Search' is not so helpful at specifics (topics), one size does NOT fit all, the universe is too big ...

Big-boards used to list the biggest forums and I think it would be relatively simple to recreate it using ml and web scraping. Someone more knowledgeable than me probably has a better idea of how to do it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130517185302/http://rankings.b...

These are plenty of good forums out there today. What they all have in common is moderators who lean in and help new users feel included and get ahead of toxic behavior.

For many years I used to host and help administer zx6e.net (a motorcycle web forum). Eventually the original founder lost interest in administering or even participating at all, so I took over all responsibilities.

As the years ticked by it became mostly idle with few new users, basically existing solely for the entertainment of a tiny group of long-time members that mostly didn't even possess a zx6e motorcycle anymore.

Between the nonexistent growth and increasingly long in the tooth forum software full of vulnerabilities I didn't really have interest in maintaining, I retired the site.

It wouldn't surprise me if a similar pattern occurred on other sites. Membership and participation diminishes, and it just becomes a pointless burden. I presume social media on smartphones has consumed everyone's attention.

I’m an admin of a forum centered around modding some CRPGs of the late 90s. It’ll be 20 years old next year (though I’ve only been part of the admins for a bit over 10).

Enhanced editions of these games were released in the 2010s, bringing old and new modders to the fold.

The heyday is long gone but we still get activity daily and new users. Creating a supplemental Discord and a Twitter auto feed for updates or releases of new content were pretty useful at keeping the forums active. The Discord is great for certain types of conversations but it did not replace the forums.

We also upgraded the Invision board software to their cloud version though it’s still Invision at the end of the day and still I find issues that were a problem back in 2009. :) But it works still.

So many discords would be better as forums

Discord stack of servers and notification are the junk-gaming culture, it is so unhealthy yet many people keep using it.

Discord have actually begun offering their own forum-like channel type [0], which I personally really like the idea of. I'm not a fan of Discord in general and I don't like how they've basically swallowed up all of the communities I'm in, but I'm glad they have an option for channels that are more forum-like now.

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

Maybe there's room for next-gen self hosted forum software with chat feature.

Chat at a typical forum-esau's discord's pace isn't that fast - you don't need a giant horizontally-scaling architecture to support your community's chat needs.

Heh or maybe you just frankenstein a forum with an irc server (with hosted history) and call it a day!

That's great, but unfortunately it doesn't solve a huge issue: discord isn't indexed by search engines. It's awesome when you know exactly where to look for the forum, but you can't easily discover it.

Extremely good point, and one that I unfortunately can't see changing under the current Discord architecture. It's a shame how Discord "servers" are so insular the way they've created them.

Yes, social media. I was active in some "niche" forums (related to music scene, guitars and etc) back in the late 2000s but then Facebook started to become a thing and then Reddit, and then Twitter, Discord etc and then the rest is history.

Have you seen how active e.g. https://thegearpage.net and https://www.head-fi.org are? If one ignores a trend one can simply outlive it, for example, some lucky developers bypassed all of the jQuery, AngularJS and non-TS React and the luckiest never even touched web front-end.

I met some lifelong friends through a skiing forum attached to a ski media company that is still going, though probably not quite as strong as it was in its heyday. Reddit's great but it's just not the same as a good vbulletin forum.

I run a fairly active forum for old Range Rovers (https://rangerovers.pub), but it just doesn't show up in Google. I don't consider this a problem, since user growth seems to just spread by word-of-mouth - when people get sick of dealing with Facebook pages they start coming to the Forum instead.

It runs on FlaskBB, which is a (reasonably) modern forum written using the Flask web framework.

You'd be amazed how many automated signups it attracts, for something that doesn't even show up on Google.

Some still exist: ResetEra, NeoGAF, and anonymous ones like DC Urban Moms. I think a lot of car forums are still in the old format you describe. Also, sportsball message board culture is still big.

I'm a member and regular user of ~21 Discourse-based forum communities. I also use a phpBB forum where there's currently a discussion about moving to something more modern, Discourse vs GitHub Discussions being the main options debated. However, I'd have to say that Discord and Reddit have either replaced or supplemented most of these (largely software and technology) forums.

Two things happened simultaneously. The forum aficionados were 90s kids who entered middle age around 2010s and sort of weaned away from online engagement, and the new gen had other shiny venues to socialize to begin with. Further, the older folk when they came back for online engagement adopted the new venues. Not everything is cannibalization by evil big tech.

<gonzo>

People moved off them because it's easy to track people via... DNS stuff.

RIP the days of vBulletin hacktivist collectives. At least towards the end, they had HTTPS: I always found it odd that the IRC people were obsessed with "opsec" while hackers like me always kept it offline, and thus never were even on the feds radar until we'd do something like show up at a BLM protest next to a Catholic school and announce over a bullhorn that we're here from the internet, and we're here to make sure you let the children speak and don't touch them without permission.

(And then smirking at the cops standing with hands on their guns. Yeah, it's me. The guy from Defcon. The one who told your bosses if they're gonna stop having elections, we're gonna stop respecting your privacy.)

</gonzo>

While software platforms have waned etc, there's still a good deal of independent, small forums out there powered by two things: community and dedicated moderators. Nothing beats that and they will continue/survive due to that. Reddit does a good job of being a way to run a small community discussion also.

But in the meantime the amount of (noise) information and sources people have to keep track of or are distracted by on social media, and now the walled off chaotic pits of discord and slack chats, has been detrimental to all of that. There's just too much and people are too lazy to hold on to one place etc because it's too easy to doomscroll on twitter or shitpost memes all day in chats. Kinda sad but also alot of symptoms of a younger generation that can only deal with their immediate present and has no sense of history and just goes through life like that.

I find Discords are pretty active. I am on a few subreddits and Discords for the same topics, and the Discord is always more active. For me I feel like I can get to know people in a Discord like I did in forums or irc, something I never felt on Reddit.

Guess it depends on the niche you're looking for. Automotive forums are alive and well.

many are still going strong. i've been wasting my morning in a sub forum of a sub forum of something awful.

I miss all those, "Dragonball Z Universe" forums and shite they used to have. I miss having arguments about why Perfect Cell would beat SSJ2 Broly's ass and things.

Nobody wants to contribute to them anymore, is my experience.

It is a shame that forums went away, now that forum software has really matured and development is vibrant: Looking in your direction NodeBB and Discourse!

Discord is the forum alternative for me these days. The fact that forums are terrible on mobile makes them less appealing, as much as I used to love them.

I can't even take discord seriously as an alternative to forums.

Why?

I run a community for people who run marketing services agencies. We didn't have an online forum, and things like Slack just didn't seem conducive to long-form, quality discussion.

I was very close to using some vBulletin type software, but we went with a platform called Guild which I can recommend.

You have to pay for it, but there are no adverts and it's very smooth.

This gets discussed often whenever there's a post about reddit, discord, slack blah blah

See related recent discussion earlier this month:

Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31681234

I often add the word forum to car/motorcycle related things I'm searching for. If I leave the word out, I end up in worthless seo retail span world. Put the word in, I get people discussing the issue. Thanks Google.

Two youtube channels I have been watching (level1tech & servethehome) also created their own forums I dont know if its kind of influencer step but both of them looks quite successful by the contributors and content.

The last forum I joined was about 12 years ago. It was all around Karaoke and building your own systems. It helped me build a semi-pro setup. I think the forum is still around, it’s just I have not been on it.

Reddit.

https://linuxmusicians.com

Reddit or Facebook have probably taken over as they don't need any technical skill to set up.

Reddit, discord, Facebook

I like textboards for scratching my "misses old style fora" itch.

There are still classic forums for... less savoury topics.

Surprised no one has mentioned Groups.io

a.ka. neo-Yahoo-Groups, possibly with some of the original people.

A number of my favorite forums migrated to groups.io then promptly died. Very sad.

People much preferred the flat web-page format of phpBB, and simply can't be bothered with the new format. To hard to post well formatted articles with embedded illustrations, etc. And impossible to edit without constantly spamming those who read the email version.

Reddit. They are all on Reddit.

Surprised noone has mentioned Discord yet. Lots of threads there.

Try Discourse.

I really dislike Discord. Is a guaranteed way to kill off an popular forum. Why, oh why, do we have to have the newest fashions forced on us?

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