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Comment by mostlysimilar | Hacker News Reader

Forum software of phpBB's era got so many things right that we get wrong today. I'm glad it's still chugging along. It's valuable software, even if that value is contained to small islands outside of the continents that are the mega-platforms of social media.

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One bad thing about old forum threads is a lot of the images are lost. Disk space and bandwidth were still expensive back then. The free image hosts mostly disappeared or started charging (so many forums have dead photobucket links).

They also got flooded with spam and were regularly hacked.

Which really didn't matter back then. People just deleted the spam, recovered from backup, patched whatever flaw they found, and changed passwords. It wasn't the end of the world.

Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.

Janny?

Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team.

Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.

Ah, makes sense.

Spam did matter when it didnt stop. No one wanted to engage in a full time job of deleting bullshit. This is one of the reasons forums disappeared and people went to larger sites that tended to have much larger moderation staff

Same thing is going to happen again once imgur shuts down.

While the pictures that were actually hosted on the forum itself are usually fine.

That will be a day of days. imgur shutting down will be like someone shaking your internet Etch-A-Sketch. The internet post imgur will have a completely different vibe.

Sounds like a job for archive.org

That doesn't solve the issue of the millions of embeds and links though.

It's kind of sad that browsers still have no concept of the passage of time (except to intentionally break things for security). One of the many things that a browser focused on being a browser for hyperlinked documents could do better than our current app delivery platforms calling themselves browsers.

Why not ? (Besides that of course it would be probably easier for the Archive to deal with multimedia inside the same website.)

What do you mean why not? If a forum embeds an image from imgur and imgur ceases to exist the image stops working. It doesn't matter if archive.org has a copy, you wont be able to see it without manually going to archive.org to find every image by its former embed url (which likley isnt archived as thats a different url to the one you see on their site).

Wait, why would it be a different Uniform Resource Locator ?

Yeah, I was really impressed how they managed to get a large chunk of Xfire backed up with only 2 days warning before shutdown !

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Xfire

And that was for video too ! (Hopefully YouTube shutting down will give more warning... speaking of which, has anyone backed up Google Video before it shut down ? I have a collection of links in a forum post that would be nice to have back up and working again.)

Still, imgur is pretty big these days, this might be quite expensive (how do they stay afloat, BTW ?).

Same thing happened when gfycat spun off the adult content into redgifs. A thousand subreddits all had their content go 404.

But people using forums also got so many things wrong.

One thing that really went wrong: people using forums as issue trackers.

Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. Instead of using an issue tracker, they post more and more messages to the one forum topic dedicated to $thing. Some hardware related forums still do that. Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find.

Also the extremely annoying UIs - as an example look at the minimal navigation / pagination buttons in many forums. Well, OK, that started to change slowly, but still we have horrible UIs everywhere. Annoyances like most space on a forum page still wasted for unimportant side information do exist - some designs are so bad that the most important information has the smallest font size.

But while the good old slick and dirty PHP forums still delivered with all that warts, mostly because these people still knew how to program fast software, then came the ruby programmers and brought us a vision of forum software that should get a premium lifetime award for coding horrors. JS heavy frontend with grotesque front-end anti-patterns and a monstrous bloated backend that breaks when your forum actually has some attention. The time of "internet software as a satirical art form" has not stopped until today.

So hopefully the old-school PHP devs can easily iron out the annoyances of the past and still deliver internet software that is fast and usable.

Happy release party, PhpBB!

> Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find.

Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.

> Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from.

That's basically the default experience of discord.

We didn’t know at the time we were in a golden age of federation that would soon be evaporating. Discoverability may have been less than say a subreddit, but the mods were in practically 100% control of the rules.

Not sure how it was in last decade but there were two things I remember that I didn't like about phpBB forums:

- lack of threads

- signature noise

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