Only ever had experiences with Reddit, Lemmy and very little bit of Discourse.

  • Seathru@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    10 months ago

    I’m sure it’s just nostalgia but I used vBulletin forums for so long, that’s what feels like home.

  • kobold@beehaw.org
    4·
    10 months ago

    started up a discourse forum recently and it’s definitely better than my historic experiences with running phpbb

      • kobold@beehaw.org
        2·
        10 months ago

        It’s better than phpbb for sure. Much easier to manage updates since it uses docker.

        It’s honestly pretty hard to set up though, they don’t have great docs on it imo, but once it’s running it seems pretty good.

        I like how customizable it is - you can change a lot of functions, and while I haven’t done much modding yet, it is nice that it has proper modding support- i added a dice roller and was able to modify it pretty easily.

        I think my main complaint is that there’s some assumptions about use - for instance, you can only have a single draft at a time (there’s a workaround- dm yourself your drafts) and there isn’t great multi-account support, which makes it hard if you’re doing character-based writing or just want to have different posting profiles - ive been trying for a while to find something like pluralkit for it but it just doesn’t exist i think.

        Overall, pretty decent. I thought to myself, I could actually see myself replacing discord with this, outside of voice chat

  • eleanor@social.hamington.netEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    I used Voat back in the day, from the beginning, when it was still called Whoaverse; to right around when it became a Nazi-filled shithole. But that doesn’t really count too much since for a good portion of that time, it ran on a modified version of the old open-source reddit code. Whatever it moved to in the short time before the new ““community”” ruined was pretty decent; lemmy-ui reminds me of it a lot actually.

    I used to be big into Imzy too, before it shutdown. Its software was somewhat like new Reddit, but like, actually performant and not a bug-riddled mess. I still miss it, but the lemmyverse, especially Beehaw, is filling that hole.

    I’ve also used the old guard of forum software, I don’t know what ran what because I didn’t really pay attention to that kind of stuff as a kid.

  • aernox@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    I doubt anyone knows about it, but I really like the design of WoltLab Burning Board 3.

    I feel like the visual layouts of forums (like the one I mentioned) lend themselves to better social interaction between users and let them get to know each other more easily. On here, I often see posts from the same people across communities, but it only becomes apparent to me after some time because the design is very minimalist (there’s really just a name over the comment), whereas in forums everyone creates their own profile picture and text and a signature; that makes everything more personal, I think. I can appreciate both though.

  • nlm@beehaw.org
    4·
    10 months ago

    I’ve spent ages on phpBB and I do kind of miss out to be honest.

    It might just be nostalgia talking though because I can’t really say exactly what I’m missing about it.

    Might just be the old communities that used it.

  • d3Xt3r@beehaw.org
    4·
    10 months ago

    Back in the “good ol’ days”, I’ve used several awesome forum software such as phpBB, vBulletin, Invision Power Board, Simple Machines Forum etc. I personally liked Invision the most, it seemed super polished and had a good set of features. phpBB was also nice but lacked features, and vBulletin felt a bit clunky to me.

  • JCPhoenix@beehaw.orgEnglish
    3·
    10 months ago

    If we’re talking about reddit-likes/alternatives, I’ve tried Imzy (gone sadly), Voat (briefly, and gone thank goodness), and Tildes. Tildes I’m still on.

    I lurk Hacker News and Ars Technica’s forums. I did sign up for a forum earlier in the year called ResetEra, which is focused on gaming. Still mostly lurk it.

  • YourHeroes4Ghosts@beehaw.org
    2·
    10 months ago

    I have been online since the early '90s, and used to be extremely active on many different forums. I even ran a fairly large forum on my own website, using Simple Machines Forums- which, to my surprise, still exists- from 2005-2008 or so.

    I can’t say I have a favourite- I really liked SMF back in the day but I have no idea what it looks like now. I really can say that I really miss the pre-Facebook Internet when there were loads of extremely active forums in every imaginable topic, and people found them and used them instead of just creating a Facebook group and pretending that everyone will just use that by default (I refuse to use Facebook for anything).

    I don’t think of Reddit and Lemmy as forums, really, not in the old-school sense. Reddit was a poor substitute, as for many years more weight was put on links than on self-posts, and in the old-school forums I’m thinking of, things like upvotes and “likes” didn’t become a thing until they were used on Reddit and Facebook, and I honestly don’t think having those features makes the Internet better.

  • Auster@kbin.social
    1·
    10 months ago

    The ones I’ve used enough to have an opinion on are Kbin Social (current one) and Lemmy World. Out of the two, I liked Kbin the most for being the most minimalist. Even if Kbin is the most unstable/beta forum of the two, I still prefer it over all the visual noise of Lemmy World.