Forum Revival Movement

Tuffy · September 27, 2025, 8:47am

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.

beetlegooze:

[…] 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.

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.

greg:

[…] 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.

[…] 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.

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}}