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161 pointsrpastuszak143 comments

Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble.

Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none of the real-life consequences.

Makes sense, although I've never considered that--the communities I modded via forums were so small / close-nit that we never had to worry about someone misbehaving. It was always "a friend of a friend" at most in terms of degrees of separation, so social pressures still applied.

The other side of that is that people who are willing to pay the cost (time, dollars, etc.) to run a forum are generally going to be more committed to that community.

It may be more fun to run a subreddit, but subreddits are also less coherent communities than forums.

It's also way easier to build a community when the buy-in is clicking a "subscribe" button with an account you already have and are logged into and knowing you can unsubscribe at any time, as opposed to registering another username, giving a random site admin your email, verifying your email, trusting they're not gonna leak your info or password, etc.

Plus everyone already knows how to use all the functionality, and they already have an app on their phone they can access you and posts will appear in the feed they're already checking.

This can be a feature rather than a bug. One of the things that I appreciate about forums is that you actually get to build relationships that are more personable than something like Reddit, because there's more commitment involved.

Significantly more personable, almost incomparably so. I've never built any form of relationship on Reddit, unless being abused by other Redditor's counts and that's a big part of why I left it.

It's an issue with HN, but people generally don't get away with the same kind of nasty stuff on here.

On the other hand I have real world friends that I originally met on forums 15 years ago.

See, this is one of many reasons why I'm sad we still use usernames/passwords for so many sites.

I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.

It sucks that often our only option for this kind of authentication is Facebook or Google, since they only see this as a way to harvest even more data about their users.

Apple's implementation is a lot better on this front, but you're still placing your trust in a trillion dollar company. And lots of sites choose not to implement it because Apple's design makes it harder to track users across domains.

> It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that

It exists, it’s a web standard, and it’s called WebAuthn

https://auth0.com/blog/introduction-to-web-authentication/

https://indieweb.org/IndieAuth

All we need for "identity" is a webpage that the world reasonably expects us to control.

For an extreme example, my "identity" is simply my page at https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dragontamer.

Because I "control" the page, and because most people have reason to trust dang/Hacker News to not manipulate my "About Page", it serves as an identity.

-------

That being said, Hacker News "About" pages probably isn't the best place for a general web identity. But maybe a static-page at "neocities.org", or "Github", etc. etc. serve as an identity in practice.

Is it really a lot of effort "managing" a password when your browser will literally create, pre-fill, and save those credentials for you?

Valid argument in 2003. Not so much in 2023.

Sadly outside of the HN crowd something like 5% of people use that functionality of their browser - and maybe 1% use a password manager.

OpenID does exactly that and has been a thing for something like 15 years now.

Quite a few big sites like Yahoo, Google, AOL Verisign would provide a URL you could login with (they were identity providers) and there were lots of independent providers too. You could easily host your own with as simple PHP script.

Sadly, fewer large sites would actually accept OpenID as a way of logging in, but you could used OpenID for authenticating Blogger comments. Stackexchange supported OpenID logins for 8 years [until July 2018](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/307647/support-for-...).

The BBC wrote quite a good summary of how things stood in 2008: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/10/openid_found...

It's another one of those sad parts of the web we lost.

With OAuth they can reuse one of many common identity providers they may already have, albeit an extra click or two.

The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum. So much so that pretty much everyone has resorted to copying it over the last 15 years.

There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.

The flat sequential thread was a reaction to threaded messages as seen on Usenet and mailing lists. It works reasonably well if users are careful to quote the messages they're responding to.

Super interesting, I didn't know it was a reaction. Looking at Usenet thread screenshots, I think the UX issue with their threads is that they actually listed the title, not the actual message in a branch format. Whereas Reddit has the actual message content in a branch format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/...

https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0b...

I think the flat sequential thread works fine with a limited number of messages. Eventually with enough replies it degrades to being very unwieldy like traditional forums.

I'm sure slashdot showed the messages in threads (at least in some modes) at least 5 years before reddit was a thing.

In fact here's a screenshot from 2005

https://www.flickr.com/photos/third/18260796

The web based forum I ran in the late 90s was threaded, then things like UBB came along and the flat structure seemed to win out.

Usenet and mailing lists had different UX problems, unrelated to tree vs. linear model - starting with all the little friction associated with browsing threads and replying to messages. Web forums improved on that. I suspect that back then, the linear model got popular incidentally, because of aforementioned UX improvements. Later on, however, people ported the tree model to the web, which gains all the same UX improvements while still not having the drawback of linear threads.

> It works reasonably well if users are careful to quote the messages they're responding to.

Unsurprisingly, they mostly weren't. Linear threads worked reasonably well when you were participating in or following a discussion as it unfolded; otherwise, they quickly became impenetrable.

Nested replies are definitely better as a way of consuming a post and its comments once and then never thinking about it again. For an asynchronous discussion between several people they get unwieldy after a few rounds of replying. They also make it harder to coherently reference points made cross-tree. That plus algorithmic ranking gives a constant feeling of "gotta refresh to see if there's new stuff" that serves a site like Reddit well, but it makes it much harder to have a longer discussion with more back and forth.

Having recently started participating in a community where most useful discussions are on a PhpBB forum, going back to linear posting was actually refreshing. It's easy to stay on top of because you can check in once a day or so and see just the conversations that have updates since you've last checked them. Threads being sorted by most recently updated means you focus on where there's active discussion. And once you've read those things there's no reason to stick around. "That's it! Get back to doing something useful."

Obviously, this doesn't really scale to a community the size of reddit, but I think it's really pleasant for medium-sized communities.

An upside of linear threads is synchrony, you've pointed out. But the linear thread format isn't incompatible with nesting necessarily, with quoting you're effectively having soft-nested conversations. What's lacking is UX that emphasizes this mixed threading style, and thus benefits from the best of both.

It might surprise you that, I think 4chan explores mixed threading like no other website does. Threads are linear, but quoting results in backlinks meaning isolated conversations are easily navigable, filtering out the "firehose". There's also a button that looks like [-] that can hide a post and all its nested replies, this can hide a specific reply chain from the linear view of the thread. I gave the system a bigger eulogy over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33567593

I think you can mostly solve these problems by changing how the trees are sorted rather than eliminating them entirely.

Here's the usability problem: You're 40 pages deep in a 100 page discussion and you see someone asked a question that you also want to know the answer to. How do you weed through the comments in the remaining 60 pages to find only answers to this question and relevant tangents? I've yet to see a conventional forum come up with a solution that doesn't involve a lot of friction or potential for missed information.

It is far too common for a forum's built in search tool to fail me for some reason or another, leading me to manually scan the entire thread. I may be willing to do that work if the information I am seeking is very important, but will I still feel that way if I just have a hunch that maybe I can provide my own input for someone else?

> The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum.

I really liked how slashdot's threading defaulted to collapsing low-scoring replies down to one line with a short (expandable) excerpt of the reply. It really helped you take in the interesting parts without the fluff and snark hogging your screen.

not really, it results in people being forced to hijack the top comment if they want any chance of their post being seen. And upvoting mechanism typically make things worse as well

> There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur

my most beloved communities are still on phpbb. A "dinosaur" platform with a couple thousand tight knit members is way way more valuable than the nightmare we're seeing unfold with Reddit or any of the other social platform. When people prefer these platforms what they're really preferring is a high user count in their "community". Stable, quality, long term, online communities are better built off the major platforms.

That is not a problem with the Fediverse-based solutions. You can navigate from your instance to the content of the other ones, and subscribing/following a remote actor is seamless.

I think SomethingAwful actuslly solves this problem eloquently, people are kes slikely to behave poorly when they pay for an account and have their name with site administration.

Alternatively i think building an invite only community by way of "web of trust" would also mitigate a lot of these issues.

IIRC LinkedIn started out as a "web of trust"

I liked how SomethingAwful would let you pay to change other users' profile picture and/or title.

People would routinely change other users' titles to a representative quote from one of their earlier posts so every one of their posts was preceded with an excerpt showing how unhinged/biased/reactionary/etc they were.

> much more fun than running your own forum.

Being an admin vs a mod is certainly different but if you’re up to the task it can be much, much more fun than being a mod on somebody else’s website, ESPECIALLY if your gripe with the other person’s website is with admin behavior.

Forums and social news media are radically different experiences, I'm not understanding why are we even comparing the two.

A forum is made of long-lasting discussions, spanning months or years. You login and you see whether there's new messages in the discussions you have been part of.

Reddit/Hackernews promotes a very different style of short lived (1/2 days at most discussion).

There's just no way a subreddit out there can replace what I get out of [1]overclockers.co.uk forum for hardware discussions (no, hardware subreddits can't even come close as an experience, you have literally discussions spanning years) or [2]mbworld for Mercedes cars.

Subreddits are toys compared to well maintained forums as source of informations.

[1]https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/

[2]https://mbworld.org/forums/mercedes-benz-sedans-1/

That's irrelevant to what the OP said. You're describing the fundamental difference of the user experience for members.

OP is talking about owners/moderators. Reddit could completely change the subreddit UI experience + posting experience to behave like oldschool forums. The ability for anyone to make a subreddit and be its moderator is the topic at hand here.

Operating an entire forum, using existing forum tech today, is way way way different.

In most forums I know the long running threads are mostly the "tell a joke" threads, which collect some off topic posts. Most other discussions are short lived as elsewhere.

The main difference to me is that most forums are harder to find, thus more intimate groups where reddit invites others to stumble in.

It’s more complicated. Topics in a forum are ordered by last answer. So, if usually most discussion are short lived, any topic can also can be revived at any time.

Which is usually called "necroposting" and is universally frowned on for... some reason. I never really got why, but on-line communities are strange beasts, and most tend to have a culture actively opposing accumulation and surfacing of knowledge.

yeah, that especially annoys me when I come across a dead thread that somehow made its way to SERP or something and someone helpfully provided a correct answer. maybe forums need a 'don't bump' checkbox enabled by default or something for old threads

I literally posted forums with years-long discussions (or threads), and those are mostly topic-specific.

On this point, forums are about fostering a community. Social media is about sniping comments. Metafilter has the best implementation I thought, which is you subscribe and can't comment for 30 days so it stops reactionary commenting at the outset and then tell people this is about community and when you have a community you watch how the community behaves and assimilate to that.

Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have.

Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.

Templating was such a drag though as a designer. Don’t know how it is now. I don’t think I saw many exciting designs that veered away from the distinctive phpbb look. You could always tell.

I remember a few pretty big sites that templated the living daylights out of it for commenting/etc, but now many seem to use Xenforo instead.

The mods being distributed as manual diff application instructions and then auto mod installers became a thing. Also called all caps MODs to distinguish them from forum moderators.

This is the hardest nostalgia. I'd forgotten about the manual diff! I was doing this at 13 and was basically what got me started in PHP development in general.

Oh yes! Same for Wordpress. And then you try to combine two mods but the patches don't merge cleanly.

I remember when Drupal introduced actual plugin hooks how revolutionary that felt :D

And doing the equivalent of partial compilation by just dragging and dropping your php install over FTP and telling it to ignore the unchanged files. Then writing .htaccess files everywhere to tell Apache what to do if you had a 'front controller' pattern.

20 years later and people are doing CGI through WASM or lambda so they can use their language of choice. Full circle as always.

Same. But for vBulletin. I then went on to build my own forum software (because who didn't?): http://web.archive.org/web/20040523030817/http://www.webtric...

I remember wtcBB! Such a neat little script, reminded me a lot of vBulletin 2 :D

Same here! Originally phpBB, then IPB 1.3, then vBulletin. Good times. :)

I was entirely obsessed with this space when I was a teenager/young adult. I would search out and try every forum software I could get my hands on, and of course (because who didn't) made my own.

God that is peak mid-00s design. Wonderful job, you hit me right in the nostalgia.

Same. Used to moderate the official vbulletin.org with some good people. This got me started in my career and I would not be where I am today without all that time spent learning the internals of vBulletin. Of course, it's a shitshow nowadays after the company took it over and the majority of good people (including developers) created XenForo. I have not been involved for over a decade :)

That's amazing. I spent a fair bit of time on vbulletin.org (I think) back in the day. Wasn't a huge poster, but lurked a lot and remember reading Kier's posts.

that era of three column layouts, solid borders, pixel graphics, tiny text, etc. is so nostalgic

Same - started using phpBB in 2000? 2001? Started my career in web development.

Same here, phpBB and vBulletin are basically what kick started my career, though I had built a ton of small static html sites before when I was in HS. I built a small but still pretty big community. I think the board ended with ~30k users, not all active, but still. I only just shut it down a few years ago. Reddit essentially killed it, and once I actually got a job it was harder to maintain my presence there and keep up with the personalities. Never made a dime from it, but it ended up being a solid investment.

I still have all of the files, etc, the database is a monster. So, I could theoretically put it back up. Took it from phpBB to vBulletin 3.6 to 4 to 5, so it was an older and long lasting. I remember setting it up my freshman year in college ('06) taking advantage of a protest of moderators on a different board (they were reading user's PMs). Some of my favorite internet memories came from internet forums. The thing I always hated about vB though is that even a minor update could cause part of a custom theme to break, and the CP felt dated, even in the early 2000s. Finding a theme template or option was so overly complicated.

That's made my afternoon! I had good fun making the original subsilver and prosilver themes all those years ago :)

I loved those themes!

Wow, thank you.

I can also thank phpBB for kicking off my career. In the mid-2000s I spent a lot of time on a few specialist gaming forums, but also a webdev forum where I was sharing what I learned about XHTML and the new CSS with other newbies.

JavaScript back then was a total obscurity - I didn't actually learn it until maybe 6 years later because, before then, everything was rendered by the server and you'd just copy DHTML snippets for silly things.

Someone approached me to help modify their phpBB forum and while I did that as a hobby for a short while, they were also the first people to pay me for it. Basically validated my work and put me on the career path I have now.

Came here to say this! I hacked phpBB to build a “Facebook before Facebook” for my friends in high school. Added features like a poetry authoring tool, turn based games, and a blog feature. While I don’t use php any more I absolutely would not be where I am today without phpBB!

I would like to use this opportunity to also mention a forum software I am building, Misago: https://misago-project.org/ (GitHub: https://github.com/rafalp/Misago/)

Around year ago I've started aggressively pursuing improvements to it's UX and features which to my surprise resulted in project getting new (small) wave of attention and a lot of great feedback on what else is missing and what needs changed that I am working on at.

I've grown on old school forums, phpBB2, Invision Power Board 2.3, vBulletin 3 and I am trying to hit a sweet spot between old and new, taking inspiration from both other modern solutions like Discourse or Flarum, but also from latest versions of XenForo and Invision Community.

Every little icon on the right side has a scrollbar on mobile Android chrome.

Thanks. You mean icons in navbar or icons on thread list?

On the thread list. They appear briefly on Firefox android, then disappear.

It looks like thread replies are presented sequentially rather than nested. Is this something you're looking to support in the future?

No, classic forums never really offered threaded discussions alike to HN or Reddit.

IPB and vBulletin had "threaded" mode where you would see a tree of replies, but it would only display a single reply, requiring you to manually select next reply to see in the UI.

In future I plan to track which post the poster clicked "reply" for and have UI to let you see direct replies to given posts, or see that post was made as a direct reply to other post, but I am not planning a "proper" tree view like how reddit does it.

Also some good opinion pieces from Discourse's creator on the subject:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design... https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/

Imagine this thread without threading. It would be 30% of its current value.

Reddit, Digg etc became popular partly _because_ of threading.

But Reddit/Digg are commentary sites, and most forums aren't.

That may be true for many of the most popular subreddits, but many of them are built for discussion and the nested replies are still considerably easier to follow than the linear firehose that is a more traditional forum.

I'm aware threading is not a thing in "classic forums".

I think threading is the killer feature that allowed spaces like Reddit to so thoroughly replace "classic forums" over the last 13 years.

I was very into deploying and modding PhpBB when I was in middle school. I learned PHP because of it (though I didn't build any substantial mods) and how to work with RDBMSes, Unix filesystems, HTML, etc. The sites that I built never engendered much community interaction though.

I was never a fan of Reddit and find traditional forums much easier to navigate. I also think that the slight friction involved in creating a separate account for these sites instead of re-using the same one across multiple lends itself better to building tight-knit communities. I hope that these systems make a comeback.

I liked the modding but I preferred Invision Power Board, at the time it looked really nice out of the box and had a lot of good features.

PunBB was really nice too, was really clean looking both in the UI and the backend code.

Reddit is easier to read (comment threading) and is text only, which is its unique value proposition. PhpBB forum, which I ironically use way more than Reddit these days, have almost no threading and limits to 10 posts per page with no hiding posts unless block all user posts, and ad banners everywhere.

But I welcome any return to self-hosting, even though most site require membership until a user can view full scale images.

Reddit comments can contain images that display with the text, without requiring a click to open. Previously it was text only, but that is no longer the case.

That is only for new topics/posts. They don’t display in the comments in the vanilla user experience.

Slightly under a year ago reddit added support for images and gifs in comments themselves.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/yo17rw/i_just_found_o...

Well, nevermind. I haven’t been there in awhile

Just has a link, at least for those of us who use old.reddit. And that's a good thing.

I don't know that this is always the case, or if it's a scale thing.

I remember great, classic forum threads with 100+ pages that would get referenced, maintained, etc. It felt like being put on the same level as everyone else in sequential order was a pretty even playing field. It also gave you the ability to summarize and respond to a few different comments at once instead of having to navigate multiple content threads.

That said, I don't know if forum discussions would work for r/funny posts at that scale. It's literally a consistent 10K comments, all junk pretty much. The number of pages would blow up constantly, and it would definitely be harder to navigate the reactions.

> I hope that these systems make a comeback.

Forums are as popular as they were 10 years ago to be honest.

I miss PhpBB. So much more well organized than Reddit or Discord or Instagram or Twitter. It feels like we've lost user experience sensibilities from the mid 2000s and now rely on algorithms and feeds to give us things we may or may not want. Hashtags and flair never made any real sense compared to threads and topics.

Forums are still around. Less popular, sure, and definitely a much smaller fraction of the entire online footprint. But if it's the experience you want, you can still get it. I've been on the Something Awful forums for almost 2 decades at this point, and there are definitely others.

The old PhpBB/VBulletin format has a certain familiar charm to it, but I find it hard to go back after using modern forum systems like Discourse that fix a lot of the old paradigm's UX shortcomings.

Anyone have experience with Flarum (https://flarum.org)? I've been peripherally aware of it for years (it it looks like it's still quite active on GitHub) and it looks like a nice lighter-weight alternative to Discourse which I know gets some flak for being resource-heavy.

I tried flarum before but iirc it was just a single “board” and not a forum of boards like I was used to. It has a feed of threads etc and IMO these are not the “modern” things that we should use to try and actually improve forum software. Just my opinion though

Honestly, at this point I think the post Reddit internet very well could be a return to lots of independent PhpBB powered forums and Discord groups.

Unlike when Digg destroyed itself there just really isn’t a single heir apparent.

If a bunch of independent traditional forums was such a compelling experience, you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them. The hay day of even large forums like Neogaf and SomethingAwful has also passed.

The reality is that registering to N forums to discuss M topics isn't very compelling. And even a large forum with a diverse off-topic section can't compete with the long tails of Reddit subreddits where people can come together to make a forum on any topic at any time with zero friction participation.

So traditional forums will keep losing to something like Reddit in the future just like they did in the past, though they still have their own niche.

One thing that’s different today is authentication options. Modern APIs (eg WebAuthn), Oauth, passkeys, WebID… Also password managers were not as ubiquitous as they are today.

I think there’s the potential to make using many different sites a lot more frictionless nowadays.

Maybe the only missing part would be an aggregator to keep track of the different communities.

Those technologies may be frictionless for users to sign on, but they're not frictionless for administrators to deploy. Creating a new subreddit is as simple as clicking a button and filling in half a dozen fields or so, plus toggling some checkboxes, and you're done! Plus it's really easy for users to find your new subreddit via the site search.

Just think of what it takes to get a new forum going: purchasing a domain name, setting up hosting, installing the forum software, setting up the aforementioned authentication APIs, dealing with SEO so people can actually find your site on Google (that one seems almost impossible now). It's absolutely dizzying. At least something like Lemmy solves all of this for you, bringing you back to a Reddit-like level of effort.

Potentially ActivityPub fixes this. I can comment and like on any Lemmy/kbin server from my own account on a totally different server.

If we wanted a forum, it would just need a new UI layer fit for purpose, reminiscent of phpbb, and be super easy to spin up.

> you have to ask yourself why Reddit was so successful despite them

No you don’t. The answer is that Reddit started out more as a topsite system than a forum; then was subsidized by billionaire VCs to capture the old forum ecosystem. Per usual as soon as they captured the market they began to transform from what made them their name. It wasn’t like people left old forums for modern Reddit because it was a better system.

As much as I love the hype, I don't think we re in "the post Reddit internet" era now...

A humongous message board like reddit creates interesting discussion just because of the diverse perspectives and experiences of the users, and once a place becomes a general forum it invites for weird, abstract or ephemeral topics. Stuff that will never be discussed in a smaller forum, but have great value.

Without a huge "town square" place like reddit, those topics simply won't be discussed in a meaningful way. The internet used to be only for geeks and academics, so forums were a mostly for hobbyist stuff. We moved past that long before reddit arrived, so it makes no sense to go back to it.

While smaller forums have higher average quality, there is much that will be lost - including very high quality material. I'd rather have a town square where I can get everything from the best to the worst, than just a small shop with a limited offer of fine quality stuff.

I still run a couple of fairly popular forums which I setup coming on nearly 15 years ago now. All powered by phpBB and recently Flarum was used for the latest site.

There's still demand there for smaller communities and while some members have dropped off over the years it's still the most popular way to keep in touch with the latest happenings, none of the other social networks really took any of the traffic away.

I'd love to see more spring up - for me there's always more of a community feel, you get to know the regulars and everyone is there for that specific topic.

It's a little clunky these days but it's still a great piece of forum software.

Related: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB a Fediverse frontend based on phpBB. Example instance on fedibb.ml

Such an amazing tool. So much value this single free and open source has given the world. Much more than many vc backed startups combined.

We need to get back to people building software instead of vc backed companies building software. I think the last decade has shown us that that is a failed experiment.

It is interesting to ponder what people might come up with given this lost decade and the countless disappointments and anti-patterns discovered.

The fediverse/activitypub design is just a building block, the real difference will be made by inventing more human-centric experiences, protecting people from the online warfare, encourage the generation and preservation of good content and meaningful exchanges.

I don't know if software can be designed to heal people's psyche, but this is what is needed now.

I actually recommend myBB [0] over phpBB for anyone looking to set up a LAMP forum. It's cleaner, better written, and possibly better maintained and with a much less scary vulnerability history. I believe it started off as an attempt to create an OSS version of IPB (or was it vB?).

[0]: https://github.com/mybb/mybb or https://mybb.com/

myBB was my preference too- I believe it’s the latter btw (very similar look and feel vBulletin back then).

Funnily enough a small collaboration group I'm part of just started a new phpBB forum to supplement our IRC chat and replace some of what we lost with reddit (most have deleted their accounts).

It's really a relic, the defaults assume minuscule server resources and features and fairly limited. But presentation and use is straightforward and it fills a niche between IRC and formal documentation on the team Wiki.

I don’t like the flat style comments of sites like PhpBB.

Is there an equivalent open source solution that does reddit style hierarchical comments?

HackerNews? It was never fully open sourced but there are older versions: http://arclanguage.org/install

lobste.rs maybe?

https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

Another similar one I saw recently was Postmill [1a][1b] but I have not tried it.

[1a] - https://postmill.xyz/

[1b] - https://gitlab.com/postmill/Postmill

This is relatively easy to do with recursive components in Vue

I don't think rendering is the problem.

[Tildes](https://tildes.net) is open source and does something like that. Not a direct 1:1 to phpBB but more like a cross between old school forums and reddit.

Tildes is a popular-kids-club-invite-only thing and therefore not a replacement for phpBB or Reddit. (Before you say it's open source and you should just run your own copy—they provide no instructions for setting up your own instance. It's apparently not meant to be used by anyone else.)

You're just saying that because you're not cool enough to get an invite.

On the other hand, I'm actually too cool for tildes.

Here I extended my simple flask+vue boilerplate https://github.com/void4/hiera

You may want to take a look on Talkyard:

> A structured discussions platform — brings together the main features from StackOverflow, Slack, Discourse, Reddit/HackerNews, and Disqus blog comments.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22702311

I wonder if it's possible to create a Lemmy community that behaves like a PhpBB forum, that is, threads are supposed to be long-lived, so they are not sorted by age, comments are supposed to be single topic, so they are not sorted by thread, and you can jump right into the last thing you saw.

It looks like a great experience to after you publish something, you just go and create a Lemmy instance (with closed down registration) to host QA forums, news discussion, and just community meetings. It looks much simpler and straight forward than managing it with all of twitter, reddit, and facebook.

Well, there's this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

This does create a forum out of Lemmy, but the forum behavior does not survive federation. It does not add a forum for the Lemmy community at large.

My question was more on the lines of adding an enum into a community's data saying this is a forum|discussion.

PhpBB 3.3.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34670280 - Feb 2023 (200 comments)

Ask HN: Why did phpBB forums go out of fashion? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33726098 - Nov 2022 (42 comments)

PhpBB's site hacked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461798 - Feb 2009 (8 comments)

Does anyone else remember Beast? It was a pretty small time piece of forum software back in the day. The Yoyogames Forums used to run on it, even way after it had stopped being maintained until some guy with an axe to grind ('patrick') brought the site to its knees thanks to a number of security exploits that had been out in the wild for a while.

I have set up a forum in the past few months and it's so hard to find young people to participate.

They may be interested in doing it but the UX seem so out of place for most of them that they won't even try. Also, the missing "app/notifications" makes them forget quickly that it exists and they may never come back.

A forum is not an alternative to Reddit.

In forums, exposure of topics depends only on recency. While Reddit and the likes combine recency with community upvotes.

Upvotes are important and allow for automatic quality control as well as keeping important things up for more exposure, even if they are not the most recent.

Forums alone are no longer the best way to go.

Yeah, no...

Everybody I know that once ran PhpBB stopped using it because they would always get overrun by spam bots.

The only way we fixed this, was to use recaptcha + manual approval of the first post. but in the last days we got some AI generated posts. the manual approval method becomes harder and harder. Especially when the bots hibernate for a while before they edit spam into their posts.

That's awesome! My first memory of PhpBB was using it for a developer job board in Utah and adding a VoiceXML script to it so folks could call a number and have the jobs read out to them - circa 2001-2002?

IMO Discussions on phpBB forums are much better than on voting/likes based discussion platforms. Less mob mentality.

I ran few forums on phpBB and vBulletin, spent a lot of time in flame wars. Those were the days.

This thing saved the 2000s Internet from being dominated by crappy blogspot.com sites.

I would not recommend phpbb. Nodebb or discourse is where it is at

Honestly no body should use PhpBB when Discourse exists.

I kind of dislike Discourse. They hijack the ctrl+F search, they lean too heavily on "infinite load", it's just too ajaxy. I used to use old.reddit.com, so that's what I enjoy. Just load the markup and get out of the way.

I never understood the appeal of Discourse. It feels heavy with an overutilization of negative space. The D programming language forum is a good example of a well-designed forum in my opinion.

If you want to use something lighter, Flarum exists, modern but lightweight built using PHP. The grapheneOS forum uses, but I like discord because its more advanced with many features and integrations.

Discourse*

I don't like their infinite scrolling instead of normal pagination.

The mastodon for reddit. Oldie but goldie

Oh yes, it brings happy memories.

takes me directly back in time to hotscripts.com, mod_php and kernel 2.6

what decade is this?

Discourse is a good modern alternative.

This. NodeBB made me switch to Discourse, because it was a nightmare to update and backup.

You know, I actually actively dislike Discourse's UX. I've always found there to be a cognitive load to usage that I never found with PhpBB, other older forum software, or Reddit.

I think my issue with it has to do with too clean of a UI, not enough visual hierarchy, delineation between post replies, etc.

I only realized yesterday that all the company web support forums I use are using Discourse, and I really hate the UI. Information density is low and infinite scrolling is a usability disaster.

I'd say that Discourse is an alternative, some people consider it good, but I personally don't like it.

What I like in PhpBB forums I joined is the organization of topics, usually hierarchical; balance of information density, not too high, not to low; good pagination that is fast to load; ctrl-f does what you expect: search in current page; theming that usually makes each forum look unique; profile and signature customization; no gamification of usage; and probably many other stuff I forgot.

Many of these things are personal and YMMV of course.

Discourse is the single worst forum software I've ever had the displeasure of using. Everything is difficult to navigate and hard to discern. It's as if someone actively sought out to create the worst user experience.

The discourse UI is horrible. Adding insult to injury, it checks browser versions and breaks for anything it deems unworthy. Why would a text forum care about which browser is used?

I'll echo what other people have said about the UI. I've used it with a lot of family and friends, likewise there have been a lot of struggles.

I'm also still rectifying against the recent changes to a shared username. As an engineer I understand why they felt the need to do it, but it feels like it's started to bring my personal/casual persona and professional one closer than I'm comfortable with. But, maybe I'm just misunderstanding the interface.

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