I tried running a forum… With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn… And I followed best practices to set it up.
Oh no, that’s really sad and disgusting. Please share the link so that we know to avoid it.
Taken down long ago. I think on day 3
Was it any good?
And I followed best practices to set it up.
Including email confirmation for registering accounts, post limits for new accounts, initially being allowed only to the entry area where one has to post and introduce themselves to be allowed elsewhere?
In my childhood these were the basics.
Well that’s still better than the weird Indian witch doctor spam I see on a couple of forums I visit.
It’s always fake passport scams that I get, where they will offer people fake passports but of course they don’t actually have any capacity to make them, so they just take your money. Is there really a massive demand for fake passports all of a sudden?
I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
1998 | 6686 1999 | 40528 2000 | 70379 2001 | 41129 2002 | 171294 2003 | 203642 2004 | 204685 2005 | 173659 2006 | 150000 2007 | 135936 2008 | 126283 2009 | 94894 2010 | 70333 2011 | 48691 2012 | 31197 2013 | 30606 2014 | 30227 2015 | 29334 2016 | 25472 2017 | 27505 2018 | 28551 2019 | 22366 2020 | 17250 2021 | 12794 2022 | 10135 2023 | 7151If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.
It’s a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I’m happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/
Thanks.
I guess I need to learn German now.
Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.
❤️
It’s a pleasure!
Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn’t think its still alive. Godspeed!
I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)
I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it’s normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.
Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.
yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.
I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.
From your stats, it’s clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.
Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.
But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
Yeah, was gonna say: it’s not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.
I haven’t run a BB forum for probably well over 15 years but in my experience the best thing was to just limit the ability to post for 24 hours after the account is being created (that makes getting caught and banned a bit more of a pain point because they have to wait 24 hours before they can do anything again) combined with just blocking Russian and Chinese IP addresses.
It’s surprising how much rubbish that stops.
At least the Fediverse exists.
Fora used to be great support groups for medical conditions. I helped run one with an RN. It was tough work keeping the trolls out, but we were also a great resource. Eventually, social media moved on. Que será.
if anyone here used to go on kongregate a lot, go check it out now. it is depressing. they dont even have chat rooms anymore
Welcome to the new era of enshittification where you’ll eventually have to subscribe to access or make posts, and none of it will be searchable on any search engines.
Commenting/making posts has always required an account of some sort, at least as far back as I can remember. Maybe the IRC days you just needed a name
With guestbooks - not always. They were full of spam, of course
At least Reddit is searchable, while Discord is not. Not trying to defend Reddit though.
At least Reddit is searchable
How long until they restrict viewing the full contents of posts without logging in?
They recently had a deal with Google, so not soon I guess
Can’t imagine it lasting too much longer. AI has poisoned the already poisoned search watering hole. Google search hasn’t actually updated in 4 years due to to advertising/marketing, they are combating SEO not acknowledging it’s their own customers. Googles Search results are shit and have been for at least 5 years cause they sold out the program.
They already did for mobile browsers.
New?
Anyway, I think all this is a result of thieves in governments becoming conscious of how the Web works and breaking it with the means they have - helping corps and making litigation more and more likely for anything small and well-behaving, because of failing to remove something etc.
It just makes sense. In 2005 with all the problems with search engines of that time, and with having to use web directories and ask people, you had a lot of information at the tips of your fingers. You could read a lot of things about people who would prefer to do their stuff more confidentially, like mafia bosses and bureaucrats and politicians.
And the shoe will probably drop at some point. Something like “communities must have nitro to access posts from more than 6 months ago”.
Forums are alive and well when looking for car info. Whenever I get a different car I look for communities with the most activity and that is usually a forum.
The one exception I can think of (proving the post to be true) is the first generation Tundra (2000-2007). The FB group had more current news than the forums and I managed to get banned (first time ever).
HiFi folks and coffee folks have active forums outside of reddit and discord.
Yeah I’m on OdyClub probably every other day and there’s always new posts coming in
Yeah everyone like “AI content flood oh noooo, AI AI AI” yet very few mention this much much bigger issue of centralized algorithmically controlled walled gardens where everyone is. That’s kinda like WeChat in China. It is hard to have real democracy or freedom of information (or privacy of any sort) when only a few big corporations have the social networks all locked down. The bad thing is because of the social network effect it’s extremely hard to get people to switch even if the alternatives are even better! So much momentum. We need to find out a way to be able to help distribute users because the software isn’t the problem anymore and neither is infrastructure or any of the other stuff that is given the big guys advantage really. The biggest problem aside from the social network effect is monetization I suppose. Still, it’s hard to even start any kind of method of monetization for alternative platforms or decentralized platforms when you can’t get anybody to switch in the first place or can’t get critical mass.
you spelled ‘non-federating internet forums’ wrong
I was very happy to find when I was getting involved in a project that it was mostly organised/discussed on their forum, it makes it so much nicer and more accessible
if you have a thread you like, make sure to archive.is or archive.org it
You can also request all of your posts on Reddit in a neat little csv. Takes about a month to get though.
And then you can go through and delete all your comments, lessening the value of Reddit as a platform.
You can also edit all your high scoring comments with bizarre misinformation so the next AI scrape gets dumber.
Even better, use an AI to generate the misinformation to save you time (and get even dumber misinformation).
I use the “nuke Reddit history” extension
I never got mine. Been a lot more that a month.
You have to go to some pretty toxic plaices if you really want to experience old internet.
Discord is not a forum lol
Discord has evolved from more or less being a series of chatrooms (like IRC) to having “threads” that work a lot like how a forum would typically be used.
In the repair community, a lot of conversation about component level repair has moved to Discord channels. Sites like badcaps.net or the Rossmann group forums have comparatively low usage. Nested away in Discord, this information doesn’t show up in search engine results and can’t be archived by web crawlers. When a Discord server is deleted or made private, that information is forever lost.
Then why are people using it as one?
Because they hate themselves /s
Two things can be true
I know of a couple Discord servers with “help” channels being used to completely replace forums which would have served the same purpose back in the day. Not sure if that’s what it’s talking about.
I wish there were alternatives to Reddit. If anyone has a recommendation, let me know.
I know right? Also iirc there was some discord alternative, but I can’t quite remember the name… it’s just as well, the company owning it probably shut it down. It’s not like it’s some free protocol that can be used by anyone, sigh 😞
IIRC there is an open source project for forums communities.
It’s called SMF I think.
Simple machine forums (smf)
phpbb
Mybb
paid - ipboards, vBulletin
But that’s all software to run on your own server
Darn you beat me to it haha
Nice avatar lol
Digg
Lemmy think on it and get back to you.
I almost feel like there’s an answer there for you, but I can’t put my finger on it.
However, last night I had a vision about th singer of Motorhead. I think it means something…
I’m struggling to see the connection with Lemmy “Kbin” Kilmister.
Didn’t he tour with Mastodon?
I have been hearing really good things about this new service called X. Very small and friendly community. You just need to register an account and do 12 easy installments of 420.69 yearly
Nice
Besides Lemmy, HackerNews is decent altho way less subject/community driven
Hackernews is just chock full of techntos who think that since they know how to code, that automatically makes them rational and more authoritative on a subject than most people. Every time I go there I’m surprised by how crappy it is lol
Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.
Love hackernews but if it gained huge traction outside of the programmer community, it’d be corpinated and enshittified in the blink of an eye by a team of MBAs.
Lobste.rs is pretty active too for tech focused topics
But getting membership is next to impossible. I tried maling them and contacting them on their IRC channel, but to no avail.
I’ve heard good things about Lemmy
ICQ
recentlyis about to shut down so I got nothing for yaICQ
recentlyis about to shut down so I got nothing for yaUh-oh 😏
We could always go back to html chats. Hotelchat, Webmaze…
Habbo Hotel
Individual websites for niches instead of amalgamation websites
Usenet
what is that?
alt.atheism
How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?
leftist infighting
There’s a place that doesn’t happen?
Truth social
Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffft
It’s funny because Lemmygrad, .ml and hexbear are almost indistinguishable from truth social of outside of plain text
Nobody hates leftists like slightly different leftists.
You take that back 👊 💥
Sure but they are mostly Nazi bars and Klan rallies.
Love Linux, but why be redundant about leftists?
Damn Leftists. They ruined Leftism!
The wrong kind of Leftist ruined Leftism, not the right kind.
/s (because this one really needs it)
Sail the high seas.
I feel like the tankie brand of leftism shouldn’t be called that. Their embracing of technocrat totalitarians kind of puts them out of the left field.
You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.
The problem is that a lot of people, specially Americans, have interiorized “red scare” propaganda notions, even when they see themselves as Lefties.
If you don’t just mentally go “uuh, commies” at the mere wiff of communal solutions it’s a lot easier to actually look at certain ideas and judge them on their actual pros and cons, as is spotting authoritarianism for what it is (whether it claims to want to implement leftwing notions or rightwing ones) and tribalism (of the kind that supports Fascism whilst claiming to be leftwing, and I include both Putin supporting “communists” and Zionism supporting “liberals”)
I don’t incessantly complain, but my Lemmy experience had improved massively by banning the most notorious instances.
Give me leftist infighting over Nazi content any day of the week!
I used to think it was great that I could find forums for so many different things in one place. Now I regret it.
it seemed truly cozy and community-based for the first decade or so. you could buy gold to directly pay for servers and that was it, no greedy monetization or shittification. then awards came out with the same transparency, and it was fun to reward people for good posts (i gave gold partially to bookmark excellent comments for myself, as well). then spez got into coke (probably, i dunno, or hit his head very hard on something) and we have modern day reddit, a trash heap. i like how they deleted all the old awards and gold records, pure spit in the face to anyone that still believed in anything they were doing.
That’s how they git ya.
Unless that “one place” is an open, federated standard that allows anyone to participate with their own self-hosted server - i.e. “one place” = the fediverse, then it’s fine!
Every now and then I get a forum as a search result and they’re just so clunky. Replies are spaced out too much, no chains, everyone has a long winded signature phrase. I’m glad it went to this kind of format.
Forums existed when everyone had a 1024x800 computer monitor on his desk, before mobile Webbrowsers where a thing. The layout did make sense at the time.
Nah even on desktop it’s clunky.
