Forum Revival Movement

IMHO we need to conquer back the old web in general.

Forums have played a big role in making the World Wide Web great in the first place. They acted as a melting pot for people sharing in-depth knowledge and communication between users around the whole world. A whole culture evolved around forums. Not one, but many. Forums served a purpose. They still do. Forums are meaningful.

Since the breakthrough of social media and platforms like Discord, forum usage has been in decline for years now. A lot of forums have died already. We really should make a turn as the internet society as a whole and start using forums more often.

This is why we started the:

I’m not that good at writing (Any suggestions to change the text/formatting/order are welcome. Can you write an even more engaging text, please do it.)

I also encourage you to share your opinion on this topic in general. You can actively engage in this project. In fact, I would really appreciate any help/support (share your ideas, write your own blog-post about this topic or just link back to our project page, any help is appreciated)

Share your suggestions on how we could achieve an even bigger old web revival.

from Tuffy with

I fully agree that we need to bring back forums! I miss them. The biggest obstacle I think is just discoverability. Things like Discord and social media end up the norm because people know to look for them (in the case of Discord servers) or already being in the ecosystem (social media). All of that to say, I think an important step in forum revival is discussing or establishing ways to make it easier for users to discover forums.

Also, I was curious: is there any specific reason why services like proboards and jcink weren’t included on the page?

Does anyone know any good forums?

this page would be great as a list of active forums, similar to brisray’s webring list to give folks an immediate call to action they can do!

@Tuffy check our previous discussion Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information - Aftermath and the linked site https://aftermath.site/best-active-forums-internet-today they’ve done a great job of identifying current active forums

I like that ProBoards has a forum directory.

I’m not sure I’d want to run a forum myself because I don’t trust myself with a banhammer any more than I’d trust myself with firearms, but it might make a decent alternative to a comments section hosted directly on a personal website, especially a static website.

And, for an annual fee, I could have “forum.starbreaker.org” instead of “starbreaker.proboards.com”.

BTW, if you don’t want Discourse to automatically hyperlink non-existent domains, escape your dots like so: \.. Otherwise, surrounding domains with backticks – as in weyland-yutani.com – also works.

I’m not the author so I can only guess, but the services they listed seem to be self-hosted forum software although they do not specify this. They may be encouraging people to use self-hosted software as opposed to run-by-others solutions.

I’m on board (lol!). I desperately miss proper general discussion forums. There are still a bunch of topical/themed forums out there with general discussion sections (like here!), but none to just kinda hang out and talk about ANYTHING at.

I’ve tried to make my own multiple times, but I’m just not cut out to be a forum administrator.

I’m already overwhelmed a little bit. I’m so glad that you like the idea and concept in general. It feels great to be around like-minded people. Been alone on my own for too long already.

How can we proceed further? This is the first movement I’m trying to start. How can we gain more momentum? I would love to hear your suggestions regarding this.

Thank you. This is what is going to happen. I will try to list all active forums on the project page soon. Curation takes a lot of my resources.

Thank you, I will have a look and try to connect with the admin and read through the forum thread you mentioned.

I will as well put a list of active forums on my website soon. The curation just eats up a lot of time. But it will be worth it.

The list of forum software / hosting services isn’t complete yet. IMHO self hosted forums are the real deal, because once a hosting service shuts down you lose the data (knowledge). In many cases you don’t own the data or can get a db dump. I haven’t looked into your suggestions yet.

It feels wrong to exclude forums hosted by a third party / service. What do all the others here think about this?

Exactly this. We want to encourage people to own the data. To be able to customize as well. I believe in this but like I have mentioned before, excluding forums from the listing just because of this seems wrong.

Yaay! Glad to have You Onboard. We can make it happen.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the support of this project! It means a lot to me.

Please share any advice that comes to your mind that might help bring back the old forum culture to new life.

from Tuffy with

i wonder if a user-edited list of active forums on this forum would be a good idea, similar to what we have with the resource list

@juette I like the idea very much. Thanks for the inspiration. To make it short, I just took action: Here is the list (not much there atm but this will be fixed soon (by all of us - hopefully)

In from 2000-2006 I ran a skateboarding forum using phpBB that had thousands of legit users and at any given time 1000 people on it. I ran another one too until about 2010.

The biggest problem with running a forum is spammers. Dozens of spam registrations every day that I had to remove, even though they never got on to the forums. And this was a long time ago. I’m sure is is worse now. phpBB was also very insecure. Very prone to hacking.

could you elaborate on what the “project” actually is? what does “joining the project” entail?

in terms of feedback on what you already have -

you specify a lot of things that aren’t particularly true;

Why forums are much better than Discord, Reddit, and Quora

Searchable through major search engines
Easier to browse through lots of threads
Old topics don’t get lost.
Often offer great search functionality on their own
Users can upload and share files of all sorts (not limited to pictures & video).
Admins don’t lose access to their forums; they can make up their own TOS.

reddit is searchable through major search engines, discord has a perfectly serviceable search functionality, you can upload and share lots of kinds of files on discord and cannot necessarily do that on a forum, and admins certainly can lose access to their forums if they violate the TOS of their host or domain name or software. old topics can get lost on a forum just as easily as on reddit; i’d say a forum is more likely to lose old material, since it depends on a random person maintaining the site and paying for storage rather than a relatively stable large company.
i think it’s kind of self-evident that “old topics get lost” on forums since you yourself, posting on a forum, did not see the older topics on the forum related to the thing you wanted to post! happens all the time; that’s a human thing, not a platform thing.

there’s also lots of forums with “like” button functionality, including this one, and lots of people posting “meaningful content” (including tutorials and knowledge) on other social media platforms.

i think if you want to convince people of something, calling them “trained monkeys” and saying everything they do is worthless is not the way to go about it! it is actually quite rude. i also think “jokingly” (?) quoting donald trump is not an especially welcoming or useful approach for a general audience, considering 1) most people on the internet are not conservative usamericans and 2) right-wing online discussions already (famously!) use forums.

generally the page presents forums as something for tech-savvy snobs and does not i think do much to convince a general audience that they would get anything out of using forums, especially since it doesn’t actually link to any existing forums they could join or look at to get a sense of the vibe.

also, your links for discuz, beehiveforum, syndie, and ikonboard are all broken - as far as i can tell they should be, respectively, https://codersclub.org/discuz.ml/, https://beehiveforum.net/, http://www.syndie.de/. i’m not sure what you had in mind for ikonboard, though, you’re on your own there.

i think focusing on providing a good service that folks are wanting (a list of active forums, for example) is a great way to get people involved in forums and reduce friction for people to share. focusing on a niche of the indie web–which is already so multi-faceted and spread out across communities and platforms–is the best way to keep yourself from being overwhelmed.

i like to say, “consistency is better than intensity.” there’s a lot of folks who come through communities like this really, really excited about the independent web; in a short time, they end up consuming their lives with thinking, talking, and breathing the personal web, and they burn out fairly quickly. i think providing a consistent, valuable, focused service to the community (like curation) that isn’t abandoned after a short time is the best way to get people over “here,” so to speak.

i can’t tell you how many times i’ve seen folks post on their websites about finding this side of the web with a link to a directory that hasn’t been updated for years, just because it was a great resource but abandoned.

making sure you’re taking care of yourself, preventing yourself from burnout and overwhelm, and being consistent in updating and reliability is the way to get the indie web at large to trust and promote a project, i think. :)

i’m also confused a bit by the “joining the project” aspect. are you looking for more curators for forums? if the project is “expanding the personal web,” i think our community is doing just that inherently! <3

That’s fair. I’ve personally been more invested in learning to self-host forums rather than relying on other services as of late. However, I think leaving out third-party services isn’t the right move. At the very least, not even mentioning their existence is probably overall a detriment.

It’s true you lose the data when the service closes down, but Proboards is 25 years old and Jcink is almost 20 years old. They both have fairly active communities and aren’t likely to go down any time soon.

Mostly, I was confused by the choice to exclude them when the project site is hosted through neocities. Excluding software like Proboards or Jcink from a project trying to encourage more forums makes about as much sense as excluding Neocities from a project trying to encourage people to engage with the small web more. Especially because self-hosting a forum is so much more involved than self-hosting a web page.

Third-party services have their risks and data ownership is important, but those are risks where the trade off is a much lower barrier for entry for anyone who is curious about the world of forums, but intimidated by the concept of setting up databases and installing plug-ins.

The quickest way to get more forums is to provide information that makes creating forums as accessible as possible.

For me, forums never really died. I’ve been on some of the same (miniature wargaming) forums for the best part of 20 years and those were often forums that were created when others of the era died off. Games Workshop closed their own forums, for example.

I also have done lots of work modding and adapting forum software over the years.

I hope forums are here to stay…

I think Discord and services like it do a huge disservice to the web. You cannot easily have two identities on two different Discord ‘servers’ or Slack instances. They’re often run by people with no idea how to run an effective community. They also have massive trust and safety issues. You can’t block someone on Discord or Slack in any meaningful way.

I echo everything @xandra said, but especially this. I also want to acknowledge how hard it can be to regulate that initial enthusiasm. I’ve been there myself. That’s okay. Ride it for a bit, but know that it will be unsustainable. Take some of this time to think about why you love forums and what is important to you about them. Those will be the things to come back to when the initial energy starts to wane.

One suggestion for proceeding that a couple other folks have made is to promote existing forums. There’s a point on your site about reaching out to existing forum admins:

Get in touch with admins of forums and ask them to support our movement, share the post database, or restart working on their forum

I like the idea of reaching out. But rather than leading with asking them to do things, you could offer to do something for them. Ask if they’d mind being included in the forum list you started here. Perhaps they’d contribute a couple sentences. Maybe some of them will register and you’ll have helped create some new connections. Connecting people who are already running active forums is a great way to make something like this grow.

A list of forums creates a reference, and that’s important. It will lead people to forums they didn’t know about. But a community of people who are passionate about forums is what creates a movement.

One last thing before I call it a post:

I’d have broken my leg just trying to sign up for a skateboarding forum, so I was sadly not a member, but I genuinely love and miss that period when it felt like half the internet was phpBB. I also love that it’s still around. I try not to get wrapped up in the nostalgia side of the personal web, but phpBB will always feel like a warm blanket.

I would also just add any forums to the list and don’t worry about asking them unless they’re private.

It might also be worth having information on the website about the various pieces of forum software.

For example: is it open source, does it require Docker, etc…

In terms of “old web” – installing bbPress is relatively easy, installing Discourse isn’t by comparison.

I would also focus on maybe one of two recommended pieces of software, and maybe a few services which host some of those pieces of software.

I’m with you, there are several drawbacks when using discord and the likes. For getting live-support or asking a short question, discord is pretty good though. Even if I dislike the impact discord has had on regular forums. I have to admit that.

Good point. I already made some changes regarding this. More to come!

You need a really good captcha these days. If your forum uses a very unique one that isn’t used on many other forums/websites you can be fine. Some spammers will do the effort of solving it manually but as long as the solution isn’t integrated in some sort of list / spamming software administrating those few is a piece of cake. Maybe I should write a guide on how to setup an effective captcha yourself because a lot of people, including myself, have struggled with keeping spammers out in the past.

Thanks for pointing out, I fixed these. The site is under heavy construction and I launched this thread here just after I hacked the site together. It’s getting updated regularly since.

I’m on this one with you. The text needs some more polishing. I’m glad for any critique and open for suggestions all the time.

Links to forums have been added already and I will keep updating these. I’m as well working on a script that will display the activity level of a given forum and the latest post entry date.

My humor may have hindered me from partaking or getting socially accepted more than once. I don’t give a s###. Nah I’m kidding, your comment has given me a valuable insight because this project comes from heart. Me trying to be funny (I think I am but…) shouldn’t let people make false assumptions or let them feel insulted in any way. I think most people aren’t offended by the trained monkey thing, a lot of them already know how pointless their social media usage is but your comment made me think. I’m not done yet so this is it.

Discords search functionality is restricted to the channels a user has joined. There is no option to search within all public discord channel afaik. A forum, on the other hand is searchable by using any regular search engine as long as it is indexed and public.

Plus a forum admin can decide whether or not, and if so, which files are allowed to be uploaded to the forums webspace. Discord has file size limitations in place (10mb for nitro users) that you can’t override. There are only some file types allowed on discord. Self-hosting a forum doesn’t come with having these limitations.

I don’t think so. First any company may decide to stop offering their service overnight. This just has happened many times (yahoo mail, geocities, whatever) and then this is affecting thousands or millions of users. An admin that is dedicated to an art, a hobby, or to the forum and its user base itself, won’t do that. Most probably the admin will hand over the admin account to another user that he trusts but as with all things in life, you can’t be 100% sure. There always is a risk, and I can only talk for myself, I would never shutdown a forum. The worst thing I could imagine is setting it to read only and pay the costs for hosting/domain as long as I live. I don’t trust big companies, they give a shit about their user base in the majority of cases.

That is partly true but on a real forum (old web style) users can browse through all thread listings in a sorted manner and jump pages. You can’t do that on reddit afaik. At least not in a comfortable way. In the end it is up to the user or the forum admins. An admin may decide to make use of a “similiar posts” approach that reminds the user after setting a title, that there might be other threads he could use to ask his question.

Good point. I’m working on these.

Full ack.

I was a bit lost on this myself. I’m open for suggestions on how “we” can proceed further as a movement. I would like to connect with people who would like to support this project in any way they want to. Whether it is help with curating the list of forums (we already found each other, thanks btw ) or just spreading the word. I could need some help with coding (php) as well, and I might give access to someone for editing the project site on my homepage as well.

100%, you are right! Thanks for this well written post. I will add more content regarding setting up and hosting your own forum and hosted services won’t be excluded but I will display an info message about the pros and cons.

Thanks for your advice. I will think about how I can get in contact with forum admins. Your suggestion sounds great, and active forum owners are a great connection. Hopefully more people that are passionate about forums will join.

Actually all of you are already taking part in this movement. Thank you so much for all of your posts, suggestions and feedback!

from Tuffy with

_{^{PS. How can I use multiquoting here? I’m switching between tabs, copying & pasting single quotes. Is there a more convenient approach? I just found out how easy it is, straight after writing down my question. You just have to mark the text and and wait for the popup to show up. This could have saved me a lot of time instead of clicking on reply for every single post and doing the copypasta thing lol}}

i do have to say that i think forums are much of the same way :’) to the point that i think “mod drama” is a gold standard trope for any retrospective on a forum. sometimes if a forum lasts long enough due to the fact of having long-standing mods that problem dissipates but oh boy the first few years are hell