A place for discussion and replies to viewtopic.php?t=739, since most of us can't write in the site announcements subforum
There are newer forum systems, that are a bit different than traditional forums, like Invision Community or Discourse
Both of them have core forum functionality, but they also have bells and whistles
e.g Invision Community can have support for adding files as separate entities, updating them and commenting on them. ResHax forum uses that to allow users to upload their modding tools, update them and allow others to comment on them
Discourse allows you to add tags to threads, and has infinite scroll/no paging; I personally find the categories system a bit confusing; this is what e.g. Haiku (OS) uses
EldosHD wrote: ↑Wed Apr 16, 2025 2:06 pm
Are there any updates on this so far?
Unfortunately there are no updates as far as I know. I do not have the money for his Patreon, therefore I could not ask Matt without waiting days for him to reply back to my emails
It turns out leaving an Internet identity behind is hard
Calling it now that the forum will be migrated to the most generic looking Discourse forum there ever is.
In all seriousness though Matt seems to be going through the same cycles I have about wanting to start an Internet community for those who are interested in and want to congregate over more old-school forms of communication. And also having the same sense of fatigue after a while when realising that it never really pans out in the modern days as you want it to do, and it gets abandoned. I've also ran a contemporary forum in modern times that was supposed to be "old-school", "retro", "classic", "Web X.0" or however you may want to call it. You manage to bring a bunch of people from "the modern Internet" (In my case people on Discord) to post on it, but after some days/months (or years if you're lucky!) it always fizzles out and becomes a ghost town. Or an airport, a community where people come in to note their arrival and then leave and disappear for months. And then it's back to Discord again.
(In my case the forum went out with a bang after fizzling out because I did the mistake of letting the wrong kind of person fester on the forum before it was too late, and even after I banned him the whole forum still feels tainted. It's effectively read-only after closing registrations since said banned person would subject it to targeted spam attacks on-and-off for months. But I digress, people are messy and that could play out in any kind of community.)
However just in general, the Internet is very different from how it was 10 or even just 5 years ago. People's behaviour when posting on forums have irreparably changed since then because all these types of forums are public spaces, meaning anything you post gets crawled, indexed, thrown into LLMs, and scrutinised. Search indexers have always been a thing but people seem to be a lot more acutely aware of the infamous term "Digital Footprint" nowadays. It creates a chilling effect that makes people remove themselves and not want to interact in these kinds of spaces, I've heard this first-hand from people who feel uncomfortable that their late night forum posting would permanently add to their Internet footprint. But I don't think this was ever something people would think of during their forum posting sprees back in the day.
And even though Discord and most servers are not actually private, the perception of privacy is high enough for most that the "high cosiness factor" that old forums used to have are now provided by Discord servers. Much to the dismay of people who prefer forums because of how inclusive they are to outsiders, lurkers, and how they aren't modern "algorithmic" (eh, I really hate that term because it's like the computer equivalent to "chemicals" for foodstuff - everything is a chemical - but I don't know how else to describe the kinds of feeds that are engineered to suck the life and joy out of you and turn you into a consuming zombie) social media that's also one failed VC funding away from going into the toilet. I'm of course also sick of navigating the underground network of Discord servers, Telegram groups, etc. who are all hush-hush and need you to know the right people to a friend of a friend to get into what would have almost definitively been a forum (with maybe an associated IRC channel) 20 years ago.
(Oh hey, this was my first post here. Hello, by the way. Lurking since August of last year.)
