Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue.
As someone who never understood the appeal of Twitter or Facebook, the new wave of FOSS social apps feels very alien to me.
As a fellow internet old timer, I agree that social media never really hooked me. I still spend vastly more time reading and posting on the SomethingAwful forums, which have been going for more than 20 years at this point, than I do Twitter. Maybe it's just "old man yells at cloud" and me refusing to change with the times, but I just strongly prefer the dynamics of forums.
Forums are also great for niche interests and communities. I used to be super into homebrewing beer (til kids happened), and there's a site called HomebrewTalk that was THE place to go to geek out on the hobby. People would share recipes, tips, photos of cool equipment they'd bought or built, industry news, etc. It's not something you can really replicate on Facebook or Twitter. I'm sure there is a homebrewing Twitter community, but by the nature of the app it's going to be much more what you're doing in the moment commentary than long form writeups preserved for all time. Both formats have their place.
I spent so many years on SA and Homebrewtalk and they were both such rich communities. Discord is nice and all (and seems to be where things are going) but there's something overwhelming about chat that was really cozy about forums.
(everything2 was incredible back when it was active and I really wish there was something like that again too)
Discord is attempting to have something more like forums[1], but as am not a heavy Discord user I haven't tried it myself.
I used to run a phpBB forum and there was something about being an admin of a forum where people you didn't know in real life came to talk. The fact that Discord distorts the term 'server' to mean 'a channel managed by us' irks me.
Square pegs into round holes. Discord's thread UI is identical to Slack's, and they're both useless for any discussions larger than ~50 messages or ~5 people.
Algorithmic feed + moderators. This is what makes FB, twitter such horrible places for building a real community. Each thread in a FB group is valued but it's ability to create more traffic and more ads and not because of it's true value to the community. The result is that what comes in your feed is usually the feeds that generate extreme reactions from different sides.
On forums if it's up you know it's a real discussion and people have add true value to it otherwise the moderators would have intervened.
If something was asked and answered it saves as a reference for next time. In social media there is no such thing. The algorithms wants you to recreate the same threads again and again just to make sure more traffic will be generated. It's no coincidence that search is not useful in FB groups.
Don’t know about algorithms, but HN does a good job of being a forum. I think it’s a combination of sensible guidelines, restricted community moderation (votes and flags) and very good manual moderation.
I never thought much about it before, but I guess forums should optimize the useful life of a given thread to loosely match the useful life of whatever is being discussed. For example, golfmk7.com is for a set of cars with model years of 2015-2021 (in the US; 2012-2021 globally) so the critical mass of discussions will probably taper off in the next 5-10 years.
I don't know the typical lifecycle of homebrew equipment, but a similar bell curve distribution should apply.
Very different timeline from discussing news and/or random gossip where nobody will care about that particular conversation a week later.
I can see the appeal in the discussion, but I certainly don't miss the forum UI. There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures. Pagination and the lack of hierarchical comments to create sub-threads made it difficult to navigate and find interesting discussions.
Personally I think hierarchical comments are the worst part of reddit/HN. They try to force a structure where there is none, and make it more difficult to navigate a discussion.
1. With hierarchical comments, you can't respond to multiple people. If you want to make an observation about the way a thread is heading, or point out a mistake multiple posters are making, you have to either (a) respond to the comment that seems most appropriate to call out (b) respond to the highest voted comment to make your post more visible or (c) make a seperate subthread to make your point (but risk your comment being ignored). With chronological comments you don't have to choose, you can do all 3 at the same point and your comment is just as visible as every other comment. Believe me, there are lots of scenerios where you wish you could respond to multiple comments.
2. With hierarchical comments it's difficult remember the context of a discussion. You always have the mental overhead of remembering what all the previous posts were talking about or risk having to scroll all the way up (personally I just use Ublock Origin's element zapper functionality to hide the comments I'm done reading to get back to the parent). On the other hand with chronological comments you always know all the comments a comment is responding to, and if your forum software supports backlinks you also know all the comments responding to a comment. 4chan has the best UX for this, you can click on any post link or backlink to open a post and then go through all of the posts that post was responding to or all of the posts responding to that post, and so on. No other forum I've used comes close IMO.
3. With hierarchical comments if you're halfway done through reading a thread and want to refresh the page you have to scroll all the way to the top and go through every comment to see if you've missed any newer comment (but I bet no one actually does this and just gives up). With chronological comments newer comments always appear at the bottom so you don't miss any part of the discussion.
You're right about the clutter but you can disable all of those, with avatars and signatures disabled the average comment takes up the same space as an HN comment.
I don't disagree with your points (well 1 and 3 anyway) but you can't just ignore the major advantage of threaded discussions: that you can branch off into different directions without derailing the thread as a whole. For example this entire subthread is about forums in general and now about hierarchical vs. linear discussion - if you actually wanted to talk about phpBB (the subject of this thread) then with a linear view you'd have to sift through and enless supply of unrelated comments. Here you can just collapse subtrees that go in an uninteresting direction.
I also don't think your problems with threaded discussion are unsolvable. I've not seen any forum implement this but I don't see why you couldn't allow someone to reply to multiple comments at once. For display you'd show the reply under the topmost parent and then only a link (or pre-collapsed comment) under the other ones.
For updates, Reddit solves this by highlighting new comments since your last visits (or other previous visits you can select from), which works really well - except that they limit the feature to paying users and subreddit moderators. HN doesn't have that feature presumably because HN doesn't want long-running discussions.
For (2) Reddit (or RES anyway) also has a solution: hovering over the [parent] link shows the parent post.
The clutter vs. minimalism is an entirely separate issue. While I wouln't advocate for giant signatures, I think some customization (avatar, titles, etc.) can be important for community building.
I have spent many years in many forums, both hierarchical and flat, and while I might agree with you on points 1 and 3, I find point 2 to be just the opposite. In my experience, flat forums devolve into a jumble of overlapping threads which are extremely difficult to follow. Or in CS terms, whereas a hierarchical forum is a simple tree, a flat forum turns into a DAG.
I think GitHub Discussions* strikes a nice balance between hierarchical and chronological comments.
The main comments are chronological, but you can also inline reply to a main comment. So the hierarchy is restricted to one level deep. I think this design flows more naturally, you avoid deep branching, and you avoid quoting a comment that was 3 pages back.
> There's too much clutter to accomodate post metadata, avatars, titles, and mostly obnoxious signatures.
The good thing about web forums is they allowed you to disable those things at the user level. Social media is top-down by design. Want to get rid of Twitter's useless 'For You' default tab? You can't, because the company has decided that that's something they want you to use, regardless of your preference.
All the cool kids were building hyper customized forums. I was so proud of myself to have written something that wasn't phpBB/Invision/vBulletin. I wanted "clean" URLs, avatar randomization and interactive signatures. So many other weird features. I didn't have a mind for "product" and just built whatever came to mind. I think a lot of us were, and that's why that era of the web was so weird and special.
I built this back before I started college. This was my hobby that consumed me, taking over from video games. I had no idea that what I was learning at the time would become a lucrative career or bring me any money at all. It was just fun. Showing off amongst friends. Building a community of like-minded people to talk with.
Hacking RM2K and Zelda Classic, bouncing around AIM/IRC, moving from IGN/EzBoard to hosted forums, exploring what others were building... It was a different time. MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook ultimately put a stop to it. People used to build so many weird and wonderful ways to talk to one another, but it wasn't scalable.
I know my view is tainted by rose colored glasses, but I do miss it.
I'm so tempted to build forums into my newest website, FakeYou.com. I know it would probably distract me from building actual product features that matter. With all the kids that are are using Discord, it wouldn't make any sense. But I always gravitate to forums. They're special.
Haha I can definitely relate to the obsession with clean URLs.
My programming career started with adding extensions to phpbb forums. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just following the install instructions that had me replacing code here and there.
One definining characteristic of internet media is where they rank on the "transience" spectrum.
The most extreme end probably being some old school chat apps and IRC on one side, and encylopedic wiki's (not the only kind) on the other. And while both forums and Usenet were closely rooted in current conversation, they had a more long-standing meaning, too. Where you could follow whole discussions even years later and where the writing style recognized this, often having single posts that more closely resemble articles.
Twitter and Mastodon seem a lot more ephemeral. As do sites like this or reddit, after all, they're concerned with "news".
StackOverflow seems closer to the forums of olden time out of most of the contemporary outlets.
So apart from the UI, you might miss that different conversational character resulting out of this.
As a final note, I do miss Wikis like the original one, where you had a lot of long-standing information, but with a conversational bent.
It’s not about what’s written, it’s about engagement and advertising. The more ephemeral the better! Then that fomo kicks in and engagement is through the roof. That is, until some rich guy buys it and runs it into the ground.
Actually, most of my favorite forums were only accessible if you registered, which in several cases required an invite. So it was less like writing letters in the open and much more like getting together with my bowling buddies or whatever. Just a group of friends who you hang out with from time to time.
Interesting! I usually see forums with hidden sections for long-time members, whether that was by registration time, post count, or manual addition. TIGForums has a fun forum section you can actually see with 0 posts (registered) and then again at a much higher post count. It vanishes as soon you do you first post.
I more meant "email" for content length, at least with my personal experience--forum posts were more like longer letter/email lengths, and Twitter felt more like texting with shorter notes (huge twitter threads aside).
It depends on the forum. I used to chat on a fully public forum with a few friends (whom I never met outside the forum) back in the 2000s. A couple hundred posts a night was typical, each post on par with or even shorter than a typical tweet. We never moved to an IM for some reason.
I love forums, still use them regularly and prefer them to social networks for many communication needs (specialized communities, focused questions, sharing semi-private things semi-anonymously, or sharing posts that take some work and I'd like to be preserved, for example). But I do understand the appeal of social networks like Twitter.
Twitter has millions of users and you have a direct connection to each of them. You can look for something and instantly view conversations about that topic and participate in them. An event happens and you can see what people are saying about it, in real time. Forums don't give you any of that.
The problem with Mastodon is that it doesn't quite get there. Federation (or at least, the way Mastodon implements it) has a lot of friction, and search is very limited. I really wanted to like it but I find it to be the worse of both worlds: neither the universality and immediacy of Twitter, nor the more intimate and archival nature of forums.
On the other hand, administrating even a moderately sized forum (or a mailing list) was a shitshow in itself. You'd deal with constant attempts of people trying to 0wn your server, to DDoS it, or to spam - and phpBB being a constant exploit source didn't help either. And then on top of that you'd have to deal with people attempting to use your server for illicit stuff - CSAM, warez, porn, you name it someone tried to abuse your system to spread it. And on top of that you'd have normal moderation duties: trolls, hate speech, flame wars.
And if you'd get really unlucky, the pigs or MAFIAA would come sending nasty C&D letters, subpoenas or a court-issued search order for some shit some of your users did.
So many communities switched over to Reddit simply because Reddit would take care of anything but "normal" moderation duties.
I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff.
I feel like reddit's success is somewhat similar. You don't have to futz around with a bunch of accounts, but you're still working within different worlds, so to speak.
Granted, this is less than, say, Discord's "each server you can have a different profile" thing, which I think is kind of the ideal here, but I feel like being able to deal with the technical issues lets communities exist!
PhpBB kind of has this, with all the plugins, a sort of uniform interface... it's not the worst thing in the world to have a solid base for running communities. We definitely don't need everyone to be _in_ that same community.
> I do think that Mastodon does accomplish this somewhat, honestly! Like each instance has its own vibe, and the sort of cross-instance virality is way less than "everyone in the same bucket" stuff.
It's still based on a model that is fundamentally different than the way that people socialize in the real world.
You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not. The focus of the design is on content and creators, not on relationships.
The old phpBB model was much closer to the way that social networks actually work in the real world. A friend might introduce you to a forum about writing, so you create an account and start hanging out with their friends there and discussing writing. You get to know someone else in that group and you find out that you're both into programming and they're involved in another forum that focuses on that. You join them over there with a new account.
It's all just friend groups. You might be in many different friend groups or just a few. You may be the only one who is in both groups, or there might be several people who overlap. With some friends you avoid discussing politics, while with others you're comfortable discussing it in depth. Some friend groups form around a game, others around a shared interest. You show different facets of yourself to the different groups, and this is codified in the structure of the apps.
This model is not well supported by Mastodon because it set out to solve a very different problem. They approached federation with the question "how do we avoid leaving our content in thrall to a corporation?" I want to approach it with the question "how do we get back to the informal friend groups that we used to have?"
the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not.
That sounds quite a lot like the old usenet model actually. You got an account on one usenet server and it was up to the server admin to decide which usenet groups they wanted to partake in and which other usenet servers it wanted to pull/push posts from/to. Other usenet servers could also decide to cut off certain servers if they misbehaved.
> You could do it differently, but the way it's designed you're supposed to have a single Mastodon account and pick an instance that hosts it. Instances decide whether to federate with other instances or not.
Why wouldn't you just have a different Mastodon account on every instance where you want a presence?
The fediverse will easily integrate more organized and persistent forms of online interaction such as the forum format you miss. All it takes is for the platform to develop an activitypub plugin to allow different instances (different forums) to exchange feeds.
Mastodon is simply the frontrunner and most mature and battle tested implementation, it does not represent the only form of the fediverse, only its 'twitter' mirror. Eg Both wordpress and discourse are said to develop plugins and something like bookwyrm (a goodreads alternative) points out how other designs implement the protocol.
But it is true that activitypub only goes so far. We should be thinking how two decades of trials and errors (mostly errors) motivate the next steps in social protocols.
phpBB forums were great for grouping discussions by topics. HackerNews still has this vibe; and maybe reddit as well. But media like twitter or mastodon instead connect you to a person, who may have multiple opinions on various subjects, often repeating or reinforcing each other day by day. This is also a valuable model; and I don't think it can be adequately translated to the phpBB one.
I think it's a mistake to equate all services that are built on top of ActivityPub to "social media" based on what Mastodon offers. There's nothing stopping a forum like service appearing that offers federation.
ActivityPub *should* (though nobody currently does, as far as I know) solve the problem of requiring a new identity for each service that you want to interact with. Ideally in a federated network you only need an account on one server and then have fun with everyone else.
I'm only speaking for myself but I feel account management fatigue having to juggle multiple ones for each social network/forum/etc. I want to interact with.
I guess I'm the opposite: I view each community I interact with as distinct, and I don't particularly want to combine them into one account.
It's like real life: I might really enjoy hanging out with my in-laws and also love my D&D group, but I don't want to introduce them to each other and I show each of them slightly different facets of my personality. I don't mind having multiple accounts if that's what it takes to keep the interactions in separate boxes.
We assume that all problems have a technological solution and that any suitable technological solution will be adopted. It follows that any unsolved problem needs new tech, since if the old tech were sufficient we wouldn't have the problem.
Yeah it’s funny because decentralized networks like Mastodon are addressing this need to be decentralized because otherwise you have these conglomerate social networks with too much power. If communities didn’t feel the need to all be on one platform like Twitter, Reddit, etc then something like Mastadon seems overkill. So really this seems like a problem of our doing
Haha oh god, I miss the days when you will tell someone "I'm userxyz on xyzforums.com", and if they are admin account they promote you to staff to help them moderate the community.
AIUI the Fediverse is just a machine-readable protocol for BBS-like or social-like interactions. So it would seem quite possible for PhpBB to interoperate with it, e.g. have users on a PhpBB board formally reference a Fediverse post such that their replies can be seen by Fediverse clients, and vice versa. It decouples social connections from the admin/moderating policies of a single board, much like email or Usenet news.
I do not understand what do you mean by "interlocking" and "overlapping" networks. The word "federate" you use very near to these words make me believe that you are talking about some technical feature - but I do not know that.
What kind of "interlocking" and "overlapping" are you writing about here?
I'm talking about interpersonal relationships, not tech. The phpBB model allowed for communities to be informally related by virtue of having overlapping members, without any need to have any technical feature that formalized those relationships.
In real life I can be a part of a bowling club and a church, and I don't need the club to know anything about the church. They're distinct entities related only by the fact that I am part of each of them.
This confusion is kind of what I'm getting at: modern "social media" and "social networks" have coopted the vocabulary of real human relationships to the point where people assume these words have technical meanings.
In the last month, I’ve been experimentally replacing my use of Trello, stickies, and todo lists with a phpBB instance.
So far I’m the only user, but it’s a surprisingly nice system for keeping track of notes and regular status updates on my projects. And when I need to collaborate with someone, the permission system is quite nice as well.
The fact that it’s free, mature, and relatively easy to install and maintain are what led me to give it a try.
I have plans to eventually write a kanban view and scheduled post plug-ins to make it a bit better project tracker.
I have been doing this since 2015 and, I agree! It is amazing how useful it is. I've tried various note taking apps, project management systems, etc and I keep coming back to this system of keeping notes and staying organized. The best part for me is I always have access to my notes even if I don't have my main device with me.
Do you think you'd feel comfortable sharing some images with redacted information to show how you are using it? Would love to peek into how a forum tool is being used in a non conventional way. Thanks!
Just a quick late note of appreciation. My friends and I have been trying to have some community way of each of us sharing progress on hobbies and side projects. After looking at this it was a smack-forehead moment. Setting up a private discourse to keep track of things as we go along :)
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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 ?).
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
I used to despise PhpBB, at the time I thought it was vastly inferior to SMF. SMF seemed far more professional, the closest you could get to vbulletin while being free.
In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while.
The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.
I wasn't a fan of PhpBB either but got used to it as a user.
PunBB, Flux, and MyBB were fantastic for small admin teams. There was very little overhead for modification and maintenance. I ran a PunBB board for over a decade. It was extremely lightweight, and if you left off the footer ID & version info in the template you wouldn't get hacked nearly as easily as with the popular systems.
(One of the worst ever was when I used a Joomla-integrated forum though...that install seemed to be sniffed at by bots endlessly)
(There was also a German commerical PHP board that I was paid to maintain for my city, can't remember the name but it worked really well. It's probably still around)
I also ran a PunBB forum (an automotive forum) for about 6 years before selling the site to VerticalScope. It was the largest PunBB-powered site for quite some time, by number of posts and users, and considering that it's still running the same old version of PunBB to this day, I'm guessing that the VerticalScope team couldn't figure out how to migrate it to InvisionPowerBoard.
Shocked they haven't been hacked and defaced, but PunBB never seemed to attract much attention compared to PhpBB and others.
vBulletin got bought by Internet Brands in 2007. While vBulletin 4 was pretty good (after a lot of upgrades), vBulletin 5 is a buggy and somewhat disastrously unpopular piece of software, with most of its users having gone to either XenForo (by the original dev team), Invision Power Board, or the various free products like phpBB, SMF, MyBB, Discourse, etc.
So if you're after the 'best' forum solution now, your best bet is definitely not vBulletin anymore.
vBulletin appears to still be in active development so I would imagine it's still ahead of the crowd, whether phpBB has caught up to where vBulletin was a decade ago is the question.
I think people who hate PHP, forgot how painful it was to develop server side apps before PHP.
I think one of the greatest legacy of PHP was brining "Serverless" hosting to the masses, where you only focus on the "upload" of the code, and you didn't need an ISS or Linux expert to deploy your projects.
Yeah, PHP had a weird teenage phase, but even JS and Python still have a lot of weird things too (specially JS). But modern frameworks as Laravel, make PHP a great alternative for DJango/FastAPI, Rails or Nest.js.
Eh, it doesn't matter that I know PHP. I don't want to use it and have barely touched it in the last few years, despite understanding many of its quirks. I'm still using WordPress at the moment but if I have to write PHP I might just quit using it.
Such a simple question as whether something is passed by reference or by value shouldn't result in "This is a super interesting piece of information! Looks like it's true; but I couldn' find any official documentation supporting this fact. We also need to know which versions of PHP support this lazy copy concept. Anyone has more info?" https://stackoverflow.com/a/9740541/3461
> which versions of PHP support this lazy copy concept
The price of a dedicated cpu is down to under $4 /month in common web hosts. Meanwhile the IO and other performance also improved so much that you dont ever, ever notice such things. So nobody cares about that kind of stuff. That's overoptimization that nobody asked for.
Are you asking what php version uses copy on write for arrays? If so, it's all of them (at least in the last decade). I have never known it not to do this.
PHP has one great feature that makes it immortal. It's the only language that assumes that each code file is actually an HTML file. Try porting a simple PHP app to Ruby or Python and you'll see what a mess it becomes.
If you use a template system like Laravel Blade or Twig, like most modern PHP projects, then this feature of PHP isn't really used anymore and porting a PHP App to Ruby or Python isn't such a big deal anymore.
In my eyes, using something like Laravel takes away the "quick and dirty" aspect of PHP and adds a lot of things which have to be learned first, makes the project more stable and more comparable to a Python Django or Ruby on Rails project.
Its also why PHP and HTML mixed code templates are extremely fast for that reason. It was designed to be that way in order to solve the templating problem.
Drupal's been on the heavy decline over the past 10 years. Drupal 8/9/10 might turn it around now that Drupal 7 is set to officially retire eventually but it's not had the staying power in the way Wordpress has.
Drupal doesn't really seem to have an ecosystem left anymore.
Sites like Wix and Squarespace really undermined Drupal and other similar OSS offerings.
There are still things you can only do with a custom sytem, but for most use-cases commercial site-design tools can get you up and running with much less upfront cost.
I designed & built about 20 websites from 2007 to 2014 or so, all with custom designs and backed by an off-the-shelf CMS. Except for the few I maintain for close friends & family, everyone has moved to Squarespace.
While I'm incredibly happy with that arrangement — nobody's pestering me about code I wrote a lifetime ago — it means a whole bunch of sites look much more generic.
I think Drupal had largely retreated to being a tool for larger sites before Squarespace’s ascent. That end of the market has increasingly been eaten up by moderately author- and marketer-friendly commercial enterpriseware from providers like Adobe and Progress. It’s a shame, because they are expensive and inhibiting tools, but security and integration demands and the relative prestige of buying blue chip, expensive software have been faster growing primary considerations.
As someone with similar history as yours but with WordPress, while I appreciate a well-designed website, I think custom websites are a gigantic waste of human resources. Very few need a custom Magento, WooCommerce, or even just a generic WordPress.org install. Every website is much safer with a PaaS, and I believe prices for these will eventually come down.
Just think that before WordPress people were coding a whole website from scratch for the local photographer or news agency, with often sub-optimal and/or overpriced results.
> a whole bunch of sites look much more generic.
True, but that's just a consequence of letting the customer deal with it directly rather than a professional. Most PaaS still allow custom designs, nobody is stopping you from adding a Flash intro page.
It had some decent developers and ecosystem around it a few years ago, but honestly a lot of bureaucracy and drama killed a lot of the enthusiasm in the project and contributed modules for many.
Drupal went really high end, and targeted the enterprise use case a lot more. It competes with Sitecore and Sharepoint more than Wordpress these days.
It's terrible for a simple blog or small community or nonprofit site these days. I know because I still run my blog on it, only due to inertia at this point (golden hammer).
From what I hear facebook is also mostly hack, which is a similar language to php. I believe it is even backwards compatible with php (or at least it used to be).
every figgin web dev topic, popularity does not evidence merits. It's just a shitty language that existed at the right time when web technologies were booming.
When more options become available, people stop choosing PHP.
And please don't reply with js, like "but PHP is better than shit", that's a real high bar.
Precisely because PHP was always used and is still used in the front-line trenches of the web where business needs are always the #1 concern. Its used by small to medium businesses, professionals, individuals to run their businesses, communities and so on. There isn't any room for overoptimization, there isnt any room for wasting the non-existent VC money in developing questionable features, there isnt any room for any complicated setup that could cost time, which actually means money.
For that reason its also the most successful front of Open Source where an actual thriving ecosystem was able to develop on it through freemium business formats like in WordPress ecosystem. The plugin ecosystem of WordPress was estimated to have $1 bn volume a few years ago. And its quite streamlined in providing software and services at scale to the point of providing ordinary users and small businesses with features at price points they would not hesitate to pay. It does constitute an example for the rest of the Open Source world could follow or at least learn from.
> There isn't any room for over optimization, there isnt any room for wasting the non-existent VC money
that is not the merit of PHP itself, more like characteristic of the period (when tech salary hasn't yet been inflated and consumer devices' computing power has not yet become abundant).
But what makes it good? It's fast, it uses low memory, it has a great package manager, it has great backwards compatibility, it has a huge ecosystem of libraries, it is easily integrated with other technology, it scales, it has an easier learning curve, it's easy to hire for (although it has been getting harder).
Its likely getting harder because PHP has developed its own specializations in the form of frameworks. Laravel is one, WordPress has become another. People look for 'Laravel developer', not 'PHP developer'. Or, 'Wocoomerce developer' -> not 'WordPress plugin developer', not 'WordPress developer', the least, not 'PHP developer'.
Specializing in one of such emerging specialization fields pays !much more! than just developing on PHP, so it will become more difficult to find PHP developers into the future. Especially the WordPress enterprise ecosystem sucks a lot of WordPress/PHP developers out of the contracting market into high-paid, long-term jobs.
The cargo cult says it sucks AND I say it sucks. There is no “because”. Maybe if you’re better at logic you would be able to code languages other than PHP.
I'm surprised it's still around. They did a good job on the software, but discussion forums seemed to go belly-up, after Facebook took off (MySpace, too, I guess).
Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.
Facebook did kill off some forums, where the built-in ability to invite or ad-target a very specific audience to a group in Facebook could grow a FB group quickly. Also, no friction of signup and verify email, etc.
I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on.
Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).
My number one issue with most of those forum "successors" is that everything is hidden behind a registration wall.
That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.
I agree - very easy to lose track of something in the random chat that occurs.
I use Discord because there's where some discussion I'm interested in happens though - not much choice sometimes.
It was definitely lisp before it was python - they used to talk about a rewrite - one of the earliest reddits were the lisp reddits - my question is if it was Arc by Paul Graham or a seperate program in Common Lisp
Forums are still doing well in specialized communities. Model-specific car forums, for example. When your Lincoln Town Car starts making a "whoomp whoomp whoomp" noise, you can usually find the answer in one of these forums.
They are tremendously useful still, and they also contain a lot of esoteric domain-specific knowledge you can't find elsewhere.
phpBB deployments are still popular, among other places, on Tor hidden sites, because the Tor Browser disables client-side Javascript, and phpBB was written before Javascript was something you could architect a whole application around, so any JS functionality in phpBB is just optional graceful enhancement.
Honestly, I think a lot of different services and systems have hurt forums popularity wise, though it happened in stages rather than all at once.
Facebook Groups did damage to communities aimed at older and less savvy audiences.
Stack Overflow likely replaced quite a few tech communities (as did its spinoffs in that network).
Reddit replaced a lot of forums for niche topics and hobbies.
And Discord seems to have taken over for a lot of 'young person focused' topics like games, film, tv shows, web series, etc.
Discord has basically annihilated about two of those services as well as many smaller communities too. Stack Overflow is losing out to Discord servers (and possibly Slack instances) aimed at the users of a specific framework or language, and many of Reddit's communities seem to be switching over to there too.
I wish it could come back, but I doubt it. A web site in that era covers the latest news to keep the site fresh, contains original resources, and has discussion forums. News went to news farms. Discussion forums moved to Reddit. Much of the original resources got straight up copied to Wikia.
Between the above and Google simply not sending traffic to small web sites, I am not sure if there could be any kind of a comeback.
I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.
To be fair; I tried migrating a population from Invision Power Board (IPB) to Discourse over 10 years ago and it did not work.
The discourse software was sleek enough, speedy enough etc; but it was too far a disconnect from how forums of yore worked. Discourse is much better suited for QnA over Discussions where each comment has equal merit; there was also an emphasis on 'personality' with older forum technology which promoted some kitsch graphics design and made people cultivate a persona (which became a reason to put more effort into replies to things).
I'm not sure if I can correctly articulate what I mean, but, just be aware: Here may be dragons.
Open source Vanilla seems to not be doing well: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-.... It's a shame. I thought it had a nice UI: mobile-friendly, not very flashy, around 300K per page (less if assets are cached), rendered on the server. I wanted to migrate my FluxBB forum to Vanilla, since FluxBB is effectively discontinued in favor of Flarum. If I migrate my forum now, it will probably be to Flarum. https://www.unitedbsd.com/ runs it, and I seem to like the experience of browsing it more than Discourse forums (edit: but I still prefer paginated forums without infinite scrolling). It also helps that Flarum has lower system requirements than Discourse. The forum migration tool https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter targets both Vanilla and Flarum, though I haven't actually attempted a migration with it, so I don't know how useful it really is.
fwiw I've come to similar conclusions, though I think Discourse has higher potential. For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app. I'm doing some tests on a DigitalOcean instance and it doesn't seem that resource hungry so far.
The Flarum community seems much more friendly, DIY and open. Having to use PHP in 2023 is a little depressing, but it would presumably integrate more easily into other PHP projects like Wordpress.
I was hoping to use NodeBB for the pure js stack but it's missing some important features and the front end is greybearded out of using a modern framework because of "speed"[1]. You can use Postgres instead of Mongo, by the way:
> NodeBB Forum Software is powered by Node.js and supports either Redis, MongoDB, or a PostgreSQL database
> For example, if you have the money, there are a couple of options to convert your instance into a native app.
Honestly, if I was going to pay for a forum, I'd probably go with (self-hosted) XenForo from the start. It has the most polished user experience of any forum software I have seen. I understand people sell custom mobile apps for it, too, though I haven't really looked.
I thought using NodeBB with PostgreSQL was not recommended for production. Looks like I was wrong. Thanks for telling me.
vBulletin got kinda killed by the Internet Brands buyout and vB4 and the vB5 upgrades. It still exists and you can still use it, but very few new sites do anymore.
I've been using PhpBB for years, started my board with them back in 2002 and the main reason I stuck with them was the versatility. I hope they can last another 20 years.
I still run 4 different web forums, and they still get a bunch of traffic. They all used to be phpBB back in the day, but all were migrated to Discourse a long time ago.
What's the easiest/cheapest way to test-host a forum?
Discourse wants payments, which doesn't make a lot of sense for something that might not even get used.
PHP, in my recollection, has always been a pain to deploy and to take care of. Does there exist something lightweight, storing data in sqlite, not requiring JS to even operate, and easy to update? I'm talking libre ofc.
You don't need to pay for Discourse, unless I've missed some major development. Though they do seem to heavily accentuate their hosting plans on their site now.
If you're happy to use Docker then the story of hosting it is pretty easy.
I wouldn't generally consider PHP a pain to deploy either for that matter, but I'm sure that all depends on your particular situation.
It's build with Python and React, so obviously not so easy to setup like PHP solutions, but there's also a magic docker setup that you can just git clone to your server and get forum running in minutes.
But with Misago I am trying to find a sweet spot between "new wave" of forum software and old solutions. So there's plenty of interactivity in the UI that JS provides and there's markdown support, but there's also classic pagination instead of infinite scrolling.
Making forum signatures for the Spore (yes, the game) forum back in 2008 was my introduction to image editing. Never got quite as good as the "pros", but I enjoyed having my own style of sig.
Not only that, I had a PhpBB hosting service back in the day and every update they changed something which nearly broke my service...
There are some really strange things in the PhpBB codebase - I remember that the software somehow found out that I injected custom code and therefore stopped working.
(My biggest problem was the upgrade from 3.0.12 to a newer version (probably 3.1) back in 2014 / 2015)
Every time I google something, I tend to add "reddit" at the end of it so I can see discussion between individuals and I hope I find an expert that can help me either understand or purchase something. I tend to also do this with "hacker news" for things related to technology.
The amount of knowledge and information on that forum is changing the way I research products and search for things on the internet. I've learned so much deep knowledge on espresso machines and I've gone down rabbit holes of how water affects espresso machines.
It gave me a deep feeling of how awful Google and reddit are at having good quality information from experts. The users on the barista forums are just experts and have been around the forum for a very long time.
It's almost like Reddit and Google are fast food and Home Barista (and other forums that use PhpBB and similar technologies) are quality, home cooked meal past down from generations of knowledge.
Now I exclusively try to find forums for a specific topic and try to find the experts on those forums to get my information, usually through a forum.
Long live PhpBB and forums and these experts on there, it's a breath of fresh air exploring the internet away from the major social media products (including Google honestly.)
Note:
The fact that home-barista is using PhpBB is purely ironic, I did not know it was, this post just reminded me of a forum that had a wealth of information and that forums are great even in 2023, heh!
PhpBB forums are the closest virtual parallel to "third places" (places that are not the home or work/school).
I'm on a soccer messageboard, and it's the only place on the internet where I recognize handles. Like Cheers, it's a place to chat, where everybody knows your name. You aren't crowded out by a thousand new people joining every day. Social media-centric tech bloggers turned this into a disadvantage ("low growth"), where for actual users, it's a godsend.
Brigading and derailaing cthreads, common on Reddit and Twitter, is largely impossible because you have to set up a user account first, and that friction drives away all but the most dedicated trolls.
I've had a Reddit account for 10 years and don't know a single person on it. It's no different from Facebook or Twitter, they're all just a amorphous chattering mass.
Ah the OG. Does anyone knowledgeable about forum software know witch is the most resource-less intensive? PhpBB, SMF, MyBB, Xenforo, BBPress (or others)?
I know with SMF, one can disable lots of features and make it lightweight, but would like to know more.
I would mention PunBB[0], which can run on a potato computer. It was often configured to use a SQLite database, so it seems very light in terms of CPU, disk and memory usage. And source code? It is very thin too.
Also Flarum [1] looks good in terms of being lightweight. It is based on Laravel Framework, so it has own pros and cons, but thanks to wise implementation of mithril.js, it feels very fast from a user perspective.
On a different spectrum, I would list Discourse [2], followed by Invision Power Board (IPB) [3]. Both require 2GB+ of RAM and a good CPU to run the server.
I never used PHPBB, but I did use the feature-strict PunBB(and then fork FluxBB). Both of those software allowed you to order threads by date, where posts were no longer able to be used to "BUMP."
Several categories had this feature enables, including any news discussion areas and the designated shitpost area.
HN and PunBB look quite similar. Even more so when using the orange skin.
One thing that HN has in common with forums though, is that threads stay around for years . And that's a good thing, as there can be a lot of useful information even in old threads.
If someone here is interested in using phpBB's interface with a much more modern backend written in Rust, check out lemmyBB: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
This has been mentioned before here, but I would like to high https://flarum.org/ as a more modern (looking) alternative, minus the nostalgia of course.
As someone who never understood the appeal of Twitter or Facebook, the new wave of FOSS social apps feels very alien to me.