[anyfoo]

They seem to make a comeback of sorts. I know a few podcasts at least that have gathered their community in "old school" web forums. Some of them literally use the old phpBB, but some use much more modern and mature software, that is a pleasure to use.

They all however still adhere to the linear (non-tree) thread model. You can answer to individual posts and they are then linked together, but all posts still appear in chronological order under the thread.

It really works, and feels much more like a community, like it did in the old days. There are also some really long-lived threads, things don't age out quickly as they do on reddit and HN. Threads are ranked by recent activity, not by upvotes.

I don't know why they make a comeback. Maybe a combination of the realization that the old forums just worked better for community building, and Facebook (which I think was indeed a large driver of the "forum death" of the 2010s) fading.

[wyclif]

There are still a lot of these old phpBB style forums in the wild, and some of them are still going strong. I have in mind TDPRI, Steve Hoffman, and Whiteblaze:

https://www.tdpri.com/

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/

https://whiteblaze.net/

[citizenkeen]

With all the people wishing for forums but not wanting to host, I'm surprised nobody had made a Discord-for-forums. Threaded, not reddit.

[freddie_mercury]

That's exactly what Discourse is. It's been around for almost a decade. Some people hate the UI.

Some examples running it

https://forums.woot.com/

https://forum.newrelic.com/s/

https://community.revolut.com/

https://forums.docker.com/

https://www.discourse.org/

[julianlam]

> Some people hate the UI.

... and it always surprises me a bit that people just assume Discourse is the only option and stop looking.

Look at Flarum, look at NodeBB. Both are making strides while staying true to the original forum threaded model.

(N.B. I maintain NodeBB)

[Nition]

I think they mean more like, imagine Reddit, but instead of anyone being able to create a new Subreddit on a new topic, it's anyone can create a new Subforum.

Discourse forums still need each owner to set up and pay for hosting.

[api]

I hope not. It would become another closed unindexable ad plastered silo. Check out the fandom wikis for an example of how it would probably look.

[account42]

If only Fandom wikis were unindexable - then they would not be drowining out community run wikis in search results for games where those still exist.

Running a site that is primarily community content and profiting from ads always seems a bit scummy to me. Particularly odd that this one is co-founded by the same Jimmy Wales better known for Wikipedia.

[tennisflyi]

Discord has a forum channel - https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...