I enjoy the way forums work and how they’re laid out. I also love how useful they are, especially when so many companies are replacing their entire communities with a Discord channel, which is less than ideal. I only use a few forums, but I’d like to find some more to browse through, it doesn’t matter the topic!
My wee list:
- TIGSource Forums - Video game developers big and small post here, there’s even a section for showcasing work-in-progress projects which is really cool.
- The Metal Archives Forums - The main site is pretty much the gold standard for metal music cataloguing. The forums are obviously about the metal genre, too.
- Cook’d and Bomb’d - This is a comedy aficionado forum. It’s about all comedy, but it originally focused on the work of Chris Morris (Brass Eye, The Day Today).
EDIT: “Meal” to “metal” 🤦
I still frequent XDA Forums for all of my custom ROM needs.
I can’t say I “frequent” it, but if you ever have ANY troublesome A/V-related question/difficulty, there are absolute wizards of the exact sort you’re imagining lurking over in AVS Forum.
I still find some good answers for questions on my car in some good old, car forums specific to whatever make you may have.
The Fantasy Grounds forum is for a virtual tabletop for TTRPGs that’s pretty active, and it’s been going through a lot of good UI updates lately since the guy from DnD Beyond joined.
That’s because the format itself promotes the accumulation of knowledge instead of the constant repetition from Reddit style forums which are better at generating new content.
I hope we don’t lose them. Or someone is archiving all this knowledge.
The biggest Swedish forum on the internet, nutorious for having a very uncensored community (they are hosted in the US as Swedish law isn’t as permissive in terms of free speech, not by much, but enough to make it worth it), so you’ll have to ignore a shitload of racism, sexism, homophobia and more crap to read it.
The reason I read it is that they love discussing current events, if you notice something on the news, a shooting or other gang war stuff you will find a thread about it with the location of the incident, information about who lives there if it is a house or apartment building, this information includes names of possible people involved, their vehicles and countless racist/sexist/homophobic/classist/other remarks, I mainly just want the location so I know what area to avoid.
They also have the greatest Swedish forum thread in the history of the internet:
“Dumma saker ni gjort” - “Stupid things you have done”.
This is a thread that runs 131 pages, of glorious posts of Swedish teenagers in the early 2000s talking about stupid things that they have done. As a Swedish millenial who grew up in and around those years, everything is so amazingly familiar to me, making the thread increadibly funny.
I am not sure how well Google translate will work on the thread, becaue there is a LOT of sloppy spelling, which adds to the charm of the posts, but here is the link:
Now I know where to go when I feel like I’m ready for native-level input in Swedish!
Therpf.com forums if you are serious about making costumes and replica props.
Tomshardware forums are still pretty decent for tech help.
LS1tech.com if you are working on an LS engine. Everything you could possibly want to know.
There’s actually quite a few Internet forums out there that cater to crowds that may be a little averse to technology and adopting things like discord or using Reddit. Car repair, Automotive, DIY construction and home repair, surprisingly quite a few tech forums like XDA developers or Tom’s, machinists, prop-making, Making in general…. Sometimes they’re not very active unfortunately, but they do have a searchable wealth of knowledge.
Something Awful
I’ve been tempted to join that site, but it seems to have too many rules.
Still worth it to lurk, they manage the fine line on being edgy without also being annoying.
Planted Tank is great for planted aquariums, and Fish Lore has an active general fishkeeping forum.
Vortex is a Volkswagen forum but has tons of conversation around other brands, too.
The official LOTRO forums are the only official game forums I’ve found that aren’t super toxic. Great community.
Really, I think old-school forums are best for specific niche interests.
+1 for vwvortex!
Fish lore was great until i got banned for offering to help. No discussion or chance to appeal. Its run by a bunch of abusive idiots if you ask me. The forum and users are great though.
I do like Whirlpool, an Australian forum primarily centred on technology. It’s still active despite the general decline of forums, has a lot of useful info to turn up in searches, and I appreciate how it has remained clean and fast without the visual clutter and wasted data of modern web design.
Doomworld for new maps and mapsets for Doom 2 and Heretic.
I enjoy http://tildes.net/ Old style, but with a modern design. You’ll see what I mean.
If you have a Gemini browser such as Lagrange, then gemini://bbs.geminispace.org is one of the better forums there.
Tildes is not an old school forum. It’s just a reddit clone. Nothing of age is bumped to the top.
It’s not a Reddit clone.
The post asks for old “style” forums. Not just forums that are actually old.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
It’s %100 a clone of old.reddit.com
The guy worked for reddit for 4 years, dude didn’t like that reddit was a “safe space” for assholes. So he left made tildes and now bans basically anyone he disagrees with.
That sounds like an exaggeration to me, but the place is healthier than most. Maybe he’s banning the right people.
It was nice, the problem is he bans people who like to discuss anything, present facts, and you get banned if it goes against his political beliefs by any matter.
Maybe I don’t frequent enough to notice that happening.
At least he has made the code freely available for others to host their own instance with their own moderation rules/style.
Yea that was a surprise. As in the past he didn’t seem to want to do that.
I believe old style means linear threads and other oldschool UI choices, not just look/aesthetics. That one has tree comment structure similar to all redditlikes, which (I believe) is relatively a recent invention? Have you seen comment trees like this few decades ago?
The discourse on Tildes is nothing like Reddit thanks to the web design and moderation choices made there. Interactions there are blissfully mature and intentional compared to what goes on over on Reddit. Also, take a look at Tildes and count how many thumbnails you see. It’s just not interesting to anyone with a short attention span who wants to plaster memes around the place.
I get what you’re saying about some UI similarities, but people don’t visit sites to click on user interface components. They’re there for an experience and for that reason Tildes is not like Reddit at all.
I personally think this is more of a culture thing than anything related to UI. So yes, moderation is very important to that, features/design/UI/UX to lesser extent. Memes on Reddit are mostly posted to subreddits dedicated to memes, you can actually just not subscribe to those. You can also use “home” feed instead of “popular”, “explore”, “all” so that you don’t get random irrelevant meme subreddits tossed into your feed. Personally, my biggest problem with Reddit is non-transparent moderation. And sometimes even automoderation. Things just get removed automatically for mysterious reasons, then you go ask why. Then question also gets removed silently without any explanations. That’s how Reddit moderation is nowadays. Lemmyworld also has some moderation issues and drama going on, but the whole platform is inherently decentralized and you’re free to pick any other instance with different admins and moderation choices. I already started using few more to see how it goes and to ultimately stick with what I like best.
I agree with all that and I don’t blame you for leaving there if that’s the experience you had. I do think even the best moderation will have bias. It’s also a thankless job. I’ve done it before on Facebook and the amount of work it takes to resolve a conflict it a bit crazy for an unpaid gig. The medium of text isn’t well suited to it unless you’re retired or something and have lots of free time. And that’s also the people who in good faith genuinely feel they’ve been wronged for not being given carte blanche in the group.
Automoderation can be helpful in detecting patterns and alleviating work from the moderators so they can spend time with their families* etc. I would say to anyone who is frustrated by that to think of it from the moderators perspective: “if I’m still in the automod queue, they must be really under pressure”. That kind of empathy online would make the role of moderator a bit more appealing to someone like myself, at least.
I agree with you about federation. It seems to be a really good solution, although it’s in its infancy and discoverability and accessibility are still an issue.
- the reason I left those platforms and moderation was because it began taking away quality time with my family. Before I quit completely, I had to make fast moderation decisions because there were so many users relative to moderators. I’m sure I made plenty of bad decisions.
That’s how I’d differentiate them too.
- Nested comments
- Voting on threads/comments
These two features mean it’s not an old style forum in my eyes.
Lol, I remember tree style forums in the early 2000s.
Just because vBulletin/PHPbb/InvasionPowerBoard/punbb didn’t use them doesn’t mean it didn’t exist
The only tree structured texting thing from back then that I remember is mailing list conversations. If you remember any names of old forums like that, it would be interesting to research. Maybe there are still screenshots or archived pages of those.
I seem to recall reading postvagnen, a Swedish railway forum, that had a tree structure in 2005 or so
RageZone, I still love to talk about private servers. Every now and then I play a private server myself!
