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Comment by KajMagnus | Hacker News Reader

Aren't there lots of new forum software?

Discourse, Flarum,

and Lemmy, open source and reminds of HackerNews/Reddit: https://join-lemmy.org (it's quite alive over at GitHub :-) https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/graphs/contributors)

And I'm developing another one, Talkyard, which reminds of HN/Reddit as well: https://www.talkyard.io (also: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...)

It seems to me that companies often want forum software, sometimes internally, sometimes for customer support — on their own domain, rather than over at Reddit.

But for consumers, maybe, like others here write, it's mostly Reddit (for English speakers)?

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Lemmy is a huge no-no for this reason: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1224

Hardcoded censoring of certain words is outright insane (to me at least).

An amusing aside regarding software responding to certain keywords...

There was a BBS package in the 80s that had language moderation as a default feature. The sysop could choose whether the BBS should refuse to post a message that included the word "shit" for instance. It was configurable, but not easily.

A friend ran a BBS on behalf of a winery in Napa Valley. But she kept having trouble with a few of the forum sections. After some debugging, it turned out that the software looked at "chardonnay" and saw "cHARDONnay"... and "hardon" was in its list of bad words.

I find that conversation highly disturbing, but it seems they've changed their mind actually https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md#hard...

> Lemmy, open source and reminds of HackerNews/Reddit

If your idea of HN/reddit is a giant SPA and websockets, sure.

And not being able to call people twats. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1224

Legendary XenForo is still around as well.

XenForo is IMO currently the best general-purpose forum system out there. Tons of features while still keeping the essence of traditional forums; paginated, non-threaded lists of posts which aren't powered by gigantic globs of JS doing a bunch of XHRs and DOM manipulations before you can read anything.

Unfortunately it's a commercial product and the owners seem to be willing to revoke licenses if they get bothered enough about the existence of one of their licensees, as a certain New Zealand agricultural collective discovered last year.

Flarum and Discourse are more "modern" but not proper successors to the traditional forum experience, in my opinion. They're doing something else and I don't like it.

I'm currently working on next iteration of my own forum software that I am using to run private forum about classic space games and I am now torn between traditional and "infinite scrolling". I've got a prototype that was infinite scroll but I've moved it back to paginated. I also have simple categories structure but I am considering going back to classic one where there was category that stored forums which in turn stored threads.

When Discourse and Flarum first appeared infinite scroll was hailed as killer feature that will bring back the life to the forums, because navigating to next page of content supposedly was the issue that prevented people from discovering all the content. But on large forum "all threads" view will just flood the user with everything (forcing them to category selection) and neither of those two offer a way to bookmark a position on threads list (or even make it easy to just browse threads older than given date) - something that paginated threads list makes easy.

Link to prototype for interested: https://v4.misago-project.org/ Source: https://github.com/rafalp/misago-local-dev

Infinite scrolling — can be annoying, I think, especially when trying to scroll down and click some footer links. Meetup .com recently made that impossible: When moving the mouse down towards the footer, instead they did more infinite scrolling, pushing the footer downwards even further, making it impossible to click. (Seems they've fixed this now)

There's a hybrid approach: One can scroll down a bit, maybe 1 page's worth of content, and thereafter, there's a Show More ... or Next button.

> classic one where there was category that stored forums

Forums inside categories? Where's that? Hmm I'm used to the opposite (categories inside a forum).

> Link to prototype

Interesting with categories to the left in their own column :- ) I've been thinking about doing that, on wide screens, in the software I'm developing

What motivates you to create Misago? / What made you start the project?

> Forums inside categories?

Category holds forums which hold threads/topics is "classic" way that you can find in phpBB/MyBB/FluxBB/Invision/vBulletin.

> What made you start the project?

I've used to run plenty of forums over last 15 years and I was never happy with existing solutions so I've started writing my own. I've written first forum software with PHP in high school and I am developing Misago since 2010. It's also lot of fun!

I personally hate infinite scrolling and would choose pagination over it for most things. Infinite scroll is essentially just pagination but with auto-loading the next page, without numbering...

Please try accessing that prototype with JavaScript disabled, and see why I feel this is also the wrong approach for the successor to classic forums.

Just put the web page content onto the web page. Nobody ever died by doing that.

I am aware how it looks like with JS off, but I'm not doing anything here that Discourse haven't done and they had massive success doing so, so I'm going to stick to it. :)

> New Zealand agricultural collective discovered last year.

Care to share what this is/was about?

Kiwifarms, I would assume. You’ll see why if you check out their Wikipedia article.

Woosh, that went right over my head. Yes, I've read of that unsavoury place.

Well, their Wikipedia article is biased and somewhat counterfactual, as they always are whenever they possibly could be. Kiwi Farms only loosely moderates non-illegal speech, so there are edgelords dropping slurs, yes, but that there are no less than two subforums clowning on Nick Fuentes/America First and related entities should put to rest the whole "alt-right/white supremacist" narrative. Also, there is a dearth of verifiable evidence that the suicide of Near/byuu recently attributed to KF and its admin actually happened - it looks an awful lot like this guy just decided to disappear from the internet for a while (as he has done before) and found a vulnerable scapegoat to help with that.

Go to the forums, do some searches to find threads on topics that interest you, and make your own decisions.

I don’t know, there’s a ton of horrific bullying every time I stumble upon the site. I think you’re downplaying it. And loads of less-than-legal activities, like sharing videos of former porn actresses purely because they’ve tried to scrub their old content from the internet (copyright infringement), revenge porn, etc.

Just as the edgy comments are their “right to free speech”, I think it’s completely fine for XenForo to exercise their right to speech by not providing them service. It’s not like they’ve had their license revoked; they just cannot get support or software updates past when their license expires.

Such a good forum software. I love stumbling upon a forum that uses it.

What are the things you like about it the most?

I mostly experienced it in the 1.x versions, so my experience is coming from that.

As an administrator I appreciated that it was easy to setup. The control panel was very powerful, and it had a very good selection of themes and add-ons. I didn't like the cost ($150/yr iirc), but it was worth it since other offerings weren't as good in my opinion. XenPorta made it simple to make an attractive blog-like homepage. XenForo's templating system let me easily customize views and CSS styling. It had a simple like system, but there were some reaction add-ons that worked very well on the forums I owned/administered.

As a user I think it has a very good UX. The editor was nice and easy to use. Animations felt polished and unobtrusive. The email templates and notification systems were very useful as a user for receiving updates. It used modals sparingly and when it did it made the UX better.

I think 2.x is a lot more polished now, although I haven't used it much. I felt that 1.x required a few add-ons and a custom theme to be fully-featured, but with those add-ons it couldn't be beat. I think even modern forum systems could learn a lot from XenForo, but my opinion is of course biased since I'm so familiar with XenForo.

I've remember reading of a Talkyard as a replacement for Disqus. If this is the same one, have you pivoted in a different direction?

How long ago was that?

Yes it's still a replacement for Disqus etc, probably will always be (I'm using it a bit myself for blog comments :- ))

Development wise, most focus is on forum software / Q&A use cases.

I don't remember exactly, but probably about a year or two ago, I flirted with the idea of starting a self-hosted blog and your solution fit the what I was looking for.

Personally, I think a Disqus replacement is/was a good idea. I just would have preferred that the license were of a more permissive kind such as BSD or MIT.

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