Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum
basementcommunity.com
basementcommunity.com
It's very pleasant to browse.
Even on dial-up, going back was an instant operation because it just loaded the cache. Even when it did reload, it would immediate blank or react in some way.
It didn't have a weird lag to it like this site does, which immediately reveals the true foundations as a more modern SPA where hitting the back button must be firing off an ajax call which is then waited on.
The commenter is complaining that the back button took too long and the creator responded to indicate it's a load issue. At no point is that in the realm of design, which is what my comment was about.
The modern web designers and app builders clearly don't agree with me with their heavy websites that make the browser eat a gig or so of RAM and all have unnecesarily slow UI's.
Maybe the real question is does this engine provide easy and performant template management? (Site is currently down can't lookup now)
You've probably discovered that building forum software is a lot more complicated than it looks. Those early boards really had a lot more going on under the hood than you thought!
It took us (a team of 3) two solid years before we considered ourselves on par with those old boards, feature-wise.
I'll say what I always say when I discover new board software — give me a run for my money. Good luck!
i'm also curious how you got into making a product around it
This is really interesting to me, because I created an "old" style forum from scratch for a gaming community about a decade ago, and it only took me a month or two to build.
I built it with Python and Angularjs. I think I had pretty much all the typical features: subforums, threads, posts, user profiles, signatures, full moderation tools, etc.
I'm actually genuinely curious about what I did differently from you. Do you have any blog posts or anything like that going into more detail about the hidden complexities that you guys dealt with under the hood?
Edit: Aha, I found your product through your profile and had a quick look. I guess it probably just comes down to amount features - you guys have a LOT more stuff going on that just a typical old forum did.
I want rank by reply-date. That, in itself, is (and was) a measure of popularity.
It’s much easier to have a few 100s of people commenting on various parts of the forum than a one single feed like HN.
You get to control the direction per your interests rather than being sprayed by an algorithm.
I can also remind the old forum rules like: "No useless posts. This includes: Necroing, Thread bumping, useless one liners, Flamewars, Trolling and Spamming."
The above is no longer an issue in the more modern forum ranking methods in combination with nesting. Its frankly just sub-par any way you slice it, since the new ways have the features of the old and add to it. There is no regression only progress, you could argue.
[0] nyx.cz kyberia.sk ...
Of course this is a pure display issue, there’s no reason one couldn’t switch between both in the same forum.
However there’s something about seeing the same thing others see and interacting with that context in mind.
Replying to multiple posts in one comment is also something that tree view discussion boards generally don't support - although it should be possible to do it.
One problem is that the 1% most popular comments get dozens/hundreds of replies, and no-one responds or even looks at the bottom 90% of comments.
The most popular posts and comments are usually very strong, divisive statements. If you don't have a strong opinion, noone will upvote you, and it will seem that everyone is either strongly for or against something.
Then there's the problem that time is a strong factor in the rankings, which means that there is rarely any long-term followup.
In old forums, there used to be threads that went on for years. Long term follow-up is close to non-existant on HN and Reddit.
And IMHO the beauty of the old-school chronological/category organization over the recommendation engines is that it's super simple and predictable, making it a lot less stressful to me, as it's not constantly trying to push your buttons, playing with your FoMO instincts and engagement metrics. If I don't feel like reading something now, it'll still be there in 2 weeks, I can find it easily if I wish.
That is to say a good recommendation engine would not use viewing, replying to, or otherwise interacting with content other than using a button that says "show me more like this" as an indication the person wants to see more like that. This is, of course not compatible with short-term profits for a site that monetizes time-on-site, but could work with such a profit model over the long term.
But the vote ranking system is absolutely horrible if you want any sort of in-depth conversation or to have multiple points of view. Conversations on forums might go on for weeks or even years, and people have time to dig up information, view media, ruminate on a point, etc. and come back and add to it later. If you don’t make a comment on a Hacker News post within a few hours, it’s likely that no one is going to read it. Come back a few days later, and you’re just shouting into a void.
Even if you do comment within a few hours, most people are going to just reply to the first couple of comments that were made. Very few people are going to scroll down and read the comments at the bottom.
And if a controversial opinion is split 52%/48%, it’s quite possible for all the comments that are in the 48% are downvoted. Even if one side isn’t 52%, but there’s a small but fanatical fanbase. IE, /r/soda is 10% coke fans that will downvote everything that’s pro-Pepsi, 15% Pepsi fans that will downvote everything pro-Coke, and 75% people who just don’t care. This will lead to all the pro-Coke posts being downvoted and all the pro-Pepsi votes being upvoted. Worse still, since Reddit and HackerNews only use the aggregate score, it will simply appear to most users like no one supports the pro-Coke position.
Of course, neither solves the problem that the most mentally unhealthy individuals are often the ones who spend the most time online, and they’ll be the ones who dominate either style of forum.
I miss the 2000s forums. They were a great source of information that was easy to read, search and for search engines to index. As the posts where often by enthusiasts they were a treasure trove, especially the automotive forums for repair information. The closest we have now is Reddit but doesn’t feel the same and the UX certainly isn’t as good even comparing to 2000s hobbyists installing vanilla Vbulletin and tweaking colours and a few plugins.
A lot of the forums I visited that died, died because success made hosting to expensive as the only option was vertical scaling the database and hard to moneytorise, then things like private Facebook groups took away the various cliques.
I often wondered if I could create a horizontal scalable forum to make hosting costs trivial. Topics are a natural partition key and old posts are heavily cacheable with only recent posts needing lower cache ttls. I think the deployment complexity would be too much for hobbyist though.
They all however still adhere to the linear (non-tree) thread model. You can answer to individual posts and they are then linked together, but all posts still appear in chronological order under the thread.
It really works, and feels much more like a community, like it did in the old days. There are also some really long-lived threads, things don't age out quickly as they do on reddit and HN. Threads are ranked by recent activity, not by upvotes.
I don't know why they make a comeback. Maybe a combination of the realization that the old forums just worked better for community building, and Facebook (which I think was indeed a large driver of the "forum death" of the 2010s) fading.
Running a site that is primarily community content and profiting from ads always seems a bit scummy to me. Particularly odd that this one is co-founded by the same Jimmy Wales better known for Wikipedia.
Some examples running it
... and it always surprises me a bit that people just assume Discourse is the only option and stop looking.
Look at Flarum, look at NodeBB. Both are making strides while staying true to the original forum threaded model.
(N.B. I maintain NodeBB)
Discourse forums still need each owner to set up and pay for hosting.
I had a whole post written out on a thread, but apparently I need to wait for approval. Bit of a bummer but we'll see how long that takes. Good luck!
These days they are topic-specific, product specific. Some I've visited recently:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/
Every game on Steam has its own "forum"...
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1167630/discussions/
This Australian forum is one of the few big ones with general topics and a nice readable design that hasn't changed in decades. Certain sub forums like news get unlocked once you're proven not a troll.
https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/
Too many to list!
Even Roger Deakins (cinematographer) has his own forum: https://www.rogerdeakins.com/forums/
Almost all automotive forums fall in that category... here's a tiny sample of what's out there:
https://www.v8buick.com/index.php
https://www.newcaprice.com/forum/
I was part of lots of forums in the past and many of them died because people eventually moved to other platforms. The way I see it, what made a forum great was the community, a constant stream of active posts and engagement. To me they were a hangout spot, a venue of entertainment more than anything else. These hangout spots seemed to have shifted to social media platforms for a lot of people.
Another issue seems to have been a decision by Google to devalue forum posts. Those used to be very common search results 5-10 years ago. It's pretty rare these days.
> "decision by Google to devalue forum posts"
Google used to have a checkbox to restrict results to forums only. They removed that years ago, which annoyed many. But you can still add "forum results only" to your search, and Google will more or less try to return forum results as first results.
For example search for: bluebox headphone volume - forum results only
Google's first result is a helpful forum post on that subject. There's nothing stopping you asking search engines to give you exactly what you want. Since search engines are now boasting "AI", they will need to listen harder to people's requests.
I do remember a heck of a scrap occurring sometime 2005/6 between 300zx.co.uk and a couple of the other forums of the time. Loads of people banned, even longtime users, site admins, committee members. It was a mess.
honestly i like the seperation of concerns though, so i'm happy with it. might even rewrite the API again to teach myself rust
- Remix server - API server
When user visits your page, their first HTTP request hits the Remix, which pulls data from API server and renders initial HTTP response from your React.js UI.
It then sends this response to the client, so you see full site load at one time, even with JavaScript off.
If you have JavaScript enabled, the client version of the React.js UI will load and replace the HTML generated on server, making things interactive. This UI will hit Remix API server for Remix features, but you can still hit your API server from individual components if you need.
I've been thinking of rebooting a crappy club for jerks and this looks like it could be a great jumping off point if you'd be willing to share
I still browse similar forums, but the second someone derails a thread, or people start arguing between each others, the browsing experience turns to sh!t.
The reddit / HN format fixed this. People can discuss endlessly between themselves, without ruining the thread. People can post completely irrelevant stuff, without ruining the thread. The import stuff floats to the top, while the less important bits sink to the bottom. With the sequential form, you're pretty much forced to endure - unless mods are quick enough to remove posts.
God no!
On Reddit (and lately HN) cretins will up/downvote depending on whether or not they agree or disagree with a post, not because of the quality of the writing. This leads to groupthink and prevents popular ideas being challenged.
Allowing posts to be downvoted simply because somebody disagrees with them (rather than because the post detracts from the discussion) is both pathetic and eventually leads to stagnation.
I tried to register with a weak password (on purpose) to check security. It works; four tries and three different errors (capital letters required, special characters required, min length required). However, I feel like a user hitting this issue accidentally would've given up after the third try. Perhaps it could be worth to check for multiple errors at once, and output them all to the user; e.g. "The password must mix case, and contain special characters, and have a minimum length of 8". Just an idea/feedback, mind you.
This one is super annoying. A long password without special characters is not any less secure than a short password with one special character added because it was required.
Better than arbitrary requirements like this would be to estimate the entropy and then just prevent low-entropy passwords (or only tell the user - not everyone needs the same level of security for everything).
I used to hang out on a lot of phpBB and vBulletin forums, and one thing that puzzles me in retrospect is why their performance was so terrible. I can certainly understand how the first versions would be not so great, but the authors released many new versions over the years that tweaked the styling and added a few features but the performance was always awful. Seems like if the authors had put their minds to it those forums could have been super fast, which everyone would have loved because slow forums translated into bigger hosting costs...
I don't remember which software it was but one of them would show, in the footer, a count of MySQL queries run. My memory tells me it would usually be in the 30-something range, maybe 50-something. It could have been 1!
It might have been Simple Machine Forum (SMF). The footer has the number of queries and number of seconds it took to generate the page (in my case, their community forum index page used 9 queries and took ~0.3 seconds to generate).
When I spun up YAF.Net on an AWS IIS server, with a same-machine backend of SQLEXPRESS, it ran like a champ for years with hardly a blip. 16 bucks a month.
It wasn't ever really snappy, per se, but at least it was consistent and didn't bog down.
So if some CRM company has their demo/demo portal, I also post aaaaaaaaaa to check the basic functionality, not hoping this will ever take off. I also post very long aaaaaaa....aaaaaaa to see how the interface deals with overflow.
Anyway whatever I post will be refreshed next day.
I also like the sports board title (though, technically, it should be "we like sportz").
I'm predicting that in a decade or two, we'll start to notice, that there's a huge gap in retained information, because so many online interactions moved into closed systems, such as social media pages or Discord servers, which aren't well or at all indexed and we might have permanently lost some platforms along the way.
I've been running https://rangerovers.pub on it for about five or six years now.
Historically SA spinoffs haven’t turned out to be the best communities.
edit: Horse Porn Junction motwithstanding, of course
Then again, D&D posters have perpetually lived in the worst period of moderation in human history since the migration off UBB.
Please don't enforce password complexity requirements other than length.
(site is currently offline)
All of that post info could be condensed to one or two lines. The alternating colors don't easily distinguish between different posts.
Another one of these weird gen-Z no-history takes.
Also, the point of this was coding your own I guess?
The 'old school' forum software still exists and runs. Not to mention more updated and modern takes like Discourse.
So much stuff that they actually never should be able to do. Like the integration we wrote that would score member uploads by release date and give.. on an FTP server.
PHP Chatbot with IRC integration? nooo problemo ;)
Edit: Haha nice old school Lonely Island reference in the Sports sub-forum subtitle
How is the SEO? Seems like poor SEO (never mind Reddit) was one of the reasons they really fell off the map.
It's so corporate now...
Wut? It would have been nice to know this before I spent effort filling out all information and generating a password.
May be worth showing that message on the registration page right from the start if/when registrations are turned off.
Anyway, I made a pending account now :)
Site looks great, btw.
One element that is missing for those nostalgia vibes that was super common at the time is a visitors counter.
Would you ever consider building/porting this to nostr?
It's unfortunate that classic web forums are dying, they're so much more useful as repositories of information than the subreddits, Discords, and Facebook groups that have replaced them over the years.
Love it.
Well done.
vBulletin, hilariously awful moderation, arguments over signature sizes, cliques, random outages, people who had just got DSL posting images that ruined the experience for posters still on dial-up.
Great times. The internet feels so banal these days.
I don’t see how anyone can hold this opinion in the current day. Early 2000s forums made a rule of ensuring things didn’t devolve into flame wars. Modern discussion technology incentivized them and turned our society into a giant flame war
Reddit vaguely has a workable approach with subreddits, but it's still high variance, and they have to discourage long-lived comment threads.
I'd take small communities run by passionate people over today's mega-sized social media any day.
> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)
> Thread locked: use the search function next time
followed by...
> (USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST)
> Thread locked: don't necropost
:^)
But it looks nice. I’m not sure about thread display on mobile though. The table format seems like it takes way too much space for the post count display.
Also, navigating back somehow keeps the existing page after swiping, and then janks back to the previous page after 200ms or so. Not sure what causes that.
I guess that makes it "2000s-inspired". I think it's fine if the visual style of the 2000s eras isn't retained, as long as the character is the same (e.g. linear threads, and threads that are ranked by last reply instead of upvotes).
Added: it is quite hard to use with lynx. I think it is best to not depend on much layout from the browser. I used WebX with lynx all the time and it was fine. Not saying this is a bad forum in general terms, but I think if it is aiming for retro appeal, it doesn't go far enough.
All our modern tools are chat based with some thread support hacked in.
Forum posts (again, on the types of forums I use) are just chronological posts (and only with quotes if the responder bothered to add them), and it can be difficult to filter out cruft.
I guess I'm conflating a few different things here.
I like threading on Slack. It has its own issues, but I prefer it to a straight message stream. I like how Discord does message replies because it automatically links back to the replied message with a preview of what's being replied to. I like forums for the search-ability and multi-quoting and subforums.
A forum is going to be way more searchable. If you want realtime notifications that was solved 50 or more years ago with email or say 20 ish years ago with RSS.
For this reason I prefer JIRA comments with @-ed colleagues over slack which provides the context and async communication.
An ephemeral slack-like (snapchat for teams!) might be useful for the remote equivalent of talking which is also ephemeral. Knowing that the conversation will be lost and will be interruptive should move most stuff on the forum.
ATC style short radio-style communications might be interesting for this too. “Dan please check broken build. Out”
But yeah there is a lot of cultural bias towards slack like chat systems and at large companies changing that would be like trying to switch away from active directory: unplausable!
I love the idea. I use Slack a lot for technical discussions with my peers. I've noticed that I seem to be the only person in our department that translates these discussions into Confluence/GitHub documentation.
I'd be very interested to see if an "ephemeral Slack" would force us to be better about documenting our discoveries/decisions/designs etc. It (Confluence) is something everybody at the company complains about, yet few actually attempt to maintain/improve.
Don't get me wrong, Confluence deserves the hate, but we don't have alternatives and, surprisingly I find Confluence a lot nicer to use than trying to search Slack when I run into an issue (provided I know where to look in Confluence, another problem in itself).
I was bummed when StackOverflow got rid of their teams feature, I had always wanted to try that out. I would 100% be on board with a forum for all long-form and persisted communication.
Ideal world: ephemeral chat for day-to-day, forum for persisted comms and institutional documentation, and zero email.
After that phpbb-style forum suddenly becomes way more interesting than before.
VMware acquired the software company that created the software, failed to market it, and it's only extant as a shadow of itself internally.
Yes, I’m aware you can use telnet, but I thought SSH felt more modern.
The reason given for the ban that the user has used Dostoevsky's book title as his handle name.
There are far worse usernames than idiot on there.
The guys (well almost one sole guy) started a bit before - in 2007 or so - a company (MesDiscussions.net) and sold the forum engine to the most successful french websites like the "infamous" Doctissimo, which now totals almost 300M messages since 2000. I believe it was then sold or incorporated to Doctissimo.
Let's not forget the french invented and used the Minitel well before dial up internet became widely spread. We quite like old things (no pun intended regarding the current First Lady)
[0] https://baensbar.net/ but you'll have to register to see anything good
https://web.archive.org/web/20080913011707/http://elitistjer...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080921165026/http://elitistjer...
"Please don't use chatroom abbreviations like "ofc". Mostly a good post, so only a warning - just try to avoid this sort of thing in the future. Thanks. Also, for future reference: the word "I" should be capitalized."
Gold.