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Comment by cauthon | Hacker News Reader

I miss the ubiquity of phpBB forums.

Hackers and spammers too. Famously bad security (which somehow got PHP got blamed for, rather than specific software) principles.

I remember how many mods for phpBB were installed by literally doing find/replaces on the source files. Absolutely insane we had people out there doing that who didn't know any PHP!

PHP got blamed for because it handed developers guns to shoot themselves in the foot with.

Yeah, I’m not a web dev, but I assumed there were one or more technical limitations that led to its decline.

I liked the interface, and the familiarity when seemingly every small-to-medium forum online was built on it.

Plus they were all scrapable. There’s a ton of information that’s hard or impossible to find now that these conversations are typically siloed in slack or discord.

In fairness, early PHP often made it much easier to do the wrong thing than the right thing while simultaneously targeting beginner web developers.

While there are still forums using old software, and more importantly, not moderated, which are overrun by spam, surely this isn't the case for those that keep up ?

(I'm also wondering how much field-specific registration questions help there, and what are the non-GAFAM alternatives to Captcha ?)

Why not Discourse? It has 34% of the discussion market now

Can you link to research behind that? I'm really curious how this defines the "discussion" market.

https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/forum-software

Oh, that's disappointing, but it answers the question of how the market is defined for the quoted statistic.

Yeah so it's not 34% of the discussion market, it's 34% of the top one million sites that use a discussion platform. The distinction is important, because the top one million sites are likely to be run by corporations as product Q&A platforms, which is very different from what you want from a Google Groups clone.

Only used discourse in a limited way but it lacks the searchability of the old forums. I can't imagine how much useful information has been lost when some of these sites have shut down.

Discussions on a well run forum would be on topic with various people adding to a conversaion, discussions on a single topic seems to get lost on these chat apps

You're thinking of Discord, not Discourse.

>Only used discourse in a limited way but it lacks the searchability of the old forums.

Are you saying that discourse lacks search features, or that most discourse forums don't have the "history" that old forums do?

Not OP, but I struggle with Discourse search, both in terms of usability (not quite good) and presentation - both D. itself and it's search is made by someone who doesn't need to exchange information and persist it. After some attempts I just fallback to external search with 'site:domain.tld search term'.

Wasting 90% of my screen real estate while actually hiding useful information isn't helping too.

The article answers that question.

Discourse doesn't feel like old, real forums.

phpBB has nicer layout

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