Most importantly, they're searchable on the internet.
If you thought Reddit or Lemmy mods were bad, wait until you deal with a forum admin on a power trip.
I always find it weird when people complain about getting banned by "power tripping mods". I have only had a few encounters with a moderator who I thought was being overly obsessive about arbitrary rules. Most of my time, I did not care to resubmit contents to a group who did not want to see it anyways. The few times that I did, I carefully tried to address the moderators objections and my repost was allowed.
Sure, there are definitely some idiots who are obsessed with their perfect view of what should be said on a forum, but most of the time that I have seen, it is a user who cannot act right and doubles down on their stupid when they get called out on it.
Forums never went anywhere. It's just that the techno hipsters found something new.
Forums never went anywhere
sadly it appears that they all but have. so many projects out there decide that Discord should be the only way to discuss development, report bugs, or offer tech support.
Forums didnt, but users did
Like WTF is a comment section under a post if not a type of forum?
Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
I've checked out a couple old newsgroups that I know of, but not much was going on. One of them was a little active and I peruse it every now and again, one was just some troll and a bunch of spam. Any good tips resources on finding newsgroups that are activeish?
Uh. Ever try to follow along in a forum when people start quoting each other and then having side conversations? The old forum layout sucks, Lemmy and Reddit with their parent-child thread-based systems are infinitely better.
Depends on the forum software, there are some that have proper threading
but making quote towers is part of the fun!
and necrobumping decade old threads. i confused a lot of people on ign making one of my only posts on a 10 year old thread. and i did that around 10 years ago haha. good times
All depend the subject. For some a web forum model is better, for others the reddit/lemmy is better. Then side convo should be handled by the webforum admins.
Posts a problem on a thread
PLEASE SEARCH BEFORE YOU ASK A QUESTION. THREAD HAS BEEN CLOSED, HERES A LINK TO THE RULES
searches with incorrect wording or phrasing and tries again
PLEASE WAIT 30 SECONDS BEFORE SEARCHING AGAIN
Finds tangentially related thread but not quite your problem and posts to it to see if anyone has had similar issues
BANNED FOR NECROING
extra points if you do it through facepunch
BANNED FOR NECROING
I never understood why forum admins hated this so much. If I have an update to an old issue, why shouldn't I post it in the same place? Why create a whole new thread?
BANNED FOR NECROING
I've seen fora so ADHD they lock threads after a month or something. This is comical, given I work in deployment and management of enterprise OSes, which typically lock versions as maintenance branches at the start of their support window. Solaris10 will die after a TWENTY-SEVEN YEAR support window, but it's typically a decade.
But if "necroing" is to update a thread after an arbitrarily-short time, and if people get banned for it, then the admins of that forum are naive and stupid. The way I solved a problem with my TheForeman installation (what junk) a few months ago leveraged something from 20 years ago.
I'm a fan of usenet's "comp" tree, anyway. Forum threading has always come off as weird, and the format has always seemed a little emoji-heavy.
I think it depends on the forum. On the forum I am, there is no search timeout and necroposting is allowed as long as you bring something relevant to the discussion. And if you accidentaly create a new post that should have been somewhere else, the post is simply moved there.
The solution: download this file and flash it
Clicks link
You have to register before you can download files.
You register, login, download the file... And then you never see that forum in your life because you only had this one difficult problem with the device or it breaks completely and you buy a different brand.
That's when you become a forum troll like Shrek
So that's the reason why in the Star Trek future there's a whole chunk of 21st Century history missing. Not because of a global war, but because everyone was posting on Slack, Discord, and gated social networks.
Forums are gated too?
Only for replying usually, at least for the ones I know
Waiting on federated forums to become a thing. I guess one could host a simple phpBB forum and let users create sub forums or categories for their own use?
Discourse is adding federation:
Lemmy actually offers a phpBB frontend: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
Some time ago lemmy.ml could be accessed through fedibb.ml, which unfortunately is down now.
Seriously, Discord is so chaotic I can't even use it.
I don't really see a lot of overlap between these technologies. To me, forums are useful for getting help / sharing knowledge on a particular topic, reporting bugs / checking for known issues in an application or product... Things like that, where the organization and retention of the information is a benefit.
Discord is a place for keeping up with friends, finding a group for a game, or discussing something current with people that share an interest (e.g. discussing the latest episode of X show). Slack is for keeping up with current things and chatting with team members at work, and following alerts for an application that you're supporting (because that's way better than email alerts). I recognize that there are people that use these technologies differently, but they each have their own niche that I wouldn't want to use the others for. Forums are not a great tool for instant communication or relatively "chaotic" discussion (it's a lot harder to follow the splitting chains of thought compared to breaking side conversations into threads that are still easy to follow along in a channel), and nobody wants to constantly refresh to keep up with the conversation.To me, forums are useful for getting help / sharing knowledge on a particular topic, reporting bugs / checking for known issues in an application or product... Things like that, where the organization and retention of the information is a benefit.
I absolutely agree with you. The problem is, increasingly others are not agreeing with us. Soooo many projects that fall into this category have 100% of all information(even documentation!) related to the project ONLY available on Discord.
I'm not saying that discord servers for support are a good solution -- I think the problems with archiving and search alone should disqualify it as a support platform.
But forums have their own problems. I think it's weird that forum advocates don't seem to consider why it started to fade as a medium. Individual accounts for each forum, the need for active moderation of threads for relevancy, and practices that made for negative user experiences like rules against necroing are all valid reasons (among others) for why people moved away from forums. And I can't think of a great way to prevent the "I need help!!" thread titles besides having moderators or approvals.
Knowledge management is hard, there's a reason why library science is a master's level degree lol
Jokes on you, i never left forums.
Forums are worth holding onto because they've been reinvented to be sleeker than they were when social media, etc replaced them
I don't know how people can stand large chatrooms
Fr. I have fun on discord when it's a smallish server/fewer people are online. But I've been on a couple more massive ones, and I just can't keep up with the conversation(s) happening too quickly. Maybe it just takes getting used to, but I haven't had the chance since my phone tends to crash from it lol
How large are we talking? My company of <50 is full of adults which use Slack with restraint. We have organised conversations and no one uses memes or reaction emojis.
I can stand it, does that help you understand?
The thread games you could play in forums were better than anything reddit clones and irc clones could muster.
You cannot possibly expect people to sit there after they type their shit frothing in the mouth waiting for any reply or stimulation because you deprived them of the ability to send their floaty emojis and see numbers move around. Imagine that.
Notifications, up/down votes, and emojis exists even on forums. You're using one that supports them right now
wikis for knowledge, IM for socialization. forums for serious discussion? thank god i don’t have to manage this stuff i have no idea what i’m saying
Oh god yes
I like how Discourse is becoming more and more popular for FOSS communities, but would love if it supported federation
Didn't discourse add apub integration just recently?
Anyone that make a chat tool that do not support the open federated matrix protocol, have ulterior motives. Probably to lock you and your eyeballs into their walled garden.
You can do forums for a community on Steam.
You can do real time chatting on Steam.
You even have a huge set of emojis!
You can also do real time voice comms via Steam, even in a group setting.
You can also stream your game, or with a little bit of tomfoolerly, your desktop, or other applications, via Steam.
This all works on basically all OSs at this point, and a large part of it works on mobile as well.
Steam is also way, waaay more secure than Discord.
And you also get MySpace-esque customizable personal homepages for yourself.
From a technical standpoint... here you go here is your solution for basically all kinds of social media/online interaction.
Why do more people not recognize this or use it this way?
/Because the vast, vast majority of internet users are uninformed, highly susceptible to peer pressure , and love to build and follow social norms for superficial reasons./
When it comes to socializing on the internet, the vast, vast majority of people will /say/ they would prefer to use some kind of system that works some kind of way, and then not actually do that and instead just go with whatever most of their friends are using, or with what is wildly popular, or with whatever some niche community they are interested in is using.
If you have ever looked at much market research data, for basically anything really, but especially tech and double especially video games, you will soon realize the vast majority of people are hypocritical and inconsistent about a great many things, and seem to /think/ they care about things that their /actions/ clearly indicate they do not really actually care about.
/Because the vast, vast majority of internet users are uninformed, highly susceptible to peer pressure , and love to build and follow social norms for superficial reasons./
I offer a less patronizing explanation:
Social interaction requires other people to interact with. A platform with more people can provide more social interaction. The average person does not make the choice to use larger platforms because they are uninformed or affected by peer pressure. They make that choice because the thing they value most in social media is a large userbase.
The average person does not claim to want something more out of social media. They don't care what advantages or disadvantages a platform has.
There are of course people who claim to care about these things and still continue to use more popular and worse platforms, but they are far less common than you seem to think. Also the fact they aren't changing their behavior doesn't mean they don't actually care, it just means they care more about other things.
What you have said is true, but does not make what I said false.
Maybe this is just my way of speaking, but if you say you care about something, or want some feature, and you are presented with it, and then... now it also needs to be something else, or something specific other thing that has that something else...
Then you did not /actually/ want the thing you said you wanted.
Yes, in that case, you are correct that this person wanted something /more/ than something else.
Look I think the easiest way to explain this is that if you take say large and thorough political polls of Americans, it is so very obvious and easy to see with the data that an astounding amount of people hold positions that are obviously logically contradictory to hold at the same time, that this is why /decades/ ago political campaigns have been focusing on key words and phrases that sound nice over non ambiguous and concrete policy positions, which generally are less popular than using certain phrases.
There are tons of people who think they care about something and will say they care about it a lot, but when push comes to shove, they will do something, engage in some behavior that evidences they dont /actually/ care about it when push comes to shove. That they will then qualify their position and start rationalizing extra conditions that make them for some reason exempt in this specific case.
I dunno, perhaps I am ranting pointlessly, but to me it seems utterly uncontroversial to say many people are hypocrites to some degree, or have inconsistent wants or beliefs, to me that seems pretty well evidenced by the entire field of psychology.
If only Steam mobile apps weren't so goddamn awful, you might have had a point.
One of my buds runs a mumble server and that shits great.
Except stack overflow. Fuck stack overflow.
+1
Am I the only one who used IRC and then Discord to moderate forums?
I miss good old days using gamefaqs and d2jsp.
Yes please !
they're just shitty, less functional, html versions of IRC anyways...
How? Seperated topics with answers only visible within the thread, how is that feasible in IRC?
I mean //list?
Why do attention hoes always
Talk like
This.
Period. Full stop.
I always wonder how assholes like you end up thinking they're acceptable, especially with a lot of your comments being okay.
Because punctuating every word with the clapping emoji went out of style a decade ago but this is still in vogue
