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Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

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djhworld·

I really miss forums tbh, what happened to them?

It feels like Discord has replaced the good old forum but it's worse in so many ways.

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> I really miss forums tbh, what happened to them?

Spammers and similar bad actors. :(

Most forums were awful phpbb nonsense where it was impossible to find the information you wanted. Search always required logging in and the only interface for very long threads was paging through them 10 badly laid out posts at a time.

No thank you.

Of course modern forums are better. Disqus is ok, and D's forum software is arguably the best thing to come out of the D project.

In any case Discord is not a replacement for forums; it's a replacement for IRC.

Unfortunately, it tries to also be a replacement for forums, with the worst of both worlds (the lack of real time, AND the lack of discoverability).

None of the phpBB-like forums that I am aware of (phpBB, SMF, vbulletin) require login to search.

I recall running into the odd one or two like that - I have vague memories that it was because searching was _slow_ and it didn't take more than a few people using it to bring the site to its knees. Restricting it to logged in users helped, and I think I saw some sites restrict searching to only post bodies for a period too, for similar reasons.

I haven't run into it recently, but I have at least vague memories of it happening in the past.

What makes the D-language forums so good? Never used them. (https://forum.dlang.org/)

Just have a browse. It's so fast! Also very clean, not stupidly sparse layout. Proper markdown support. I believe it also acts as a mailing list/newsgroup somehow but I'm not sure on the details of that.

Mainly it's just so fast and clean.

> Search always required logging in

I always used a search engine to search. Site search is usually worse than Google (is/was)

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