> It's interesting (and sad) how the forums of yesteryear have essentially gone away entirely
May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.
The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.
In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
> The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. […] In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX.
Yes, it’s so good that all this “excessive metadata” was replaced by… even worse metadata, and white space, and all the metadata is above and below comments because having giant margins is absolutely necessary, so information density absolutely tanked to non-existent.
> In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?
I honestly prefer to see sites made by people who don't know how to design anything. The people who do know how to design websites seem to be either malicious or designing in the interest of some alien species from another dimension- see how bad Discourse looks, whitespace galore, too low density. Its modern polish is both its strength and its weakness.
Last activity and a (small) icon are valuable information. The icons visually distinguish users and "last seen" lets you know whether you are replying to a person or primarily replying for the benefit of the community. Also, distinct pagination means you have a stable location for each post instead of "scroll around until you see it".
I agree with your point about signatures and initial sign-up being clutter.
Remember the Joel on Software forums? I think they were the first popular (at least in the tech world) forums that had a very simple interface. I don't think they had avatars/user icons, they definitely didn't have rich text or signatures. They didn't even support quoting (you could do it by copy/paste) or subthreading. The idea was that they were more like a natural discussion that way.
May phpBB and its ilk burn in hell.
I understand and recognize the value of private/self-hosted forums (I'm commenting on HN after all!) However the design principles of phpBB and similar forum software of the early 2000s were horrendous, and single-handedly held me back from participating in some communities I would have liked.
The excessive metadata displayed around comments, such as the user's icon, initial sign-up, or last activity cluttered the interface. And signatures! God those awful multi-line signatures, making every comment potentially a banner ad, when someone was just posting "this". And having to page through each... page, cluttered with inane responses.
Perhaps they were just a product of their era, script kiddies building their l33t hangout spaces before learning principles of design and UX, and before XmlHttpRequest came along to allow dynamic loading.
In any case, I'm extremely glad Discourse came along and democratized proper forum UX. I agree that we need an adequate free alternative. What are the candidates?