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by delis-thumbs-7e 27 days ago
Couldn’t you today make a fairly decent forum technology with all we know today and all libraries available etc? Naive question perhaps (web dev not exactly my cup of tea), but can it really be that hard? Or is that nobody cares enough?
4 comments
pelagicAustral 27 days ago
Yeah, you are absolutely right! I think this is my new weekend sesh... my brand new vBulletin...
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vgeek 27 days ago
Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?
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pelagicAustral 27 days ago
Sadly taken: https://github.com/rc5hack/yabb
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vgeek 27 days ago
Hence the congruent capitalization in my post. :D
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egypturnash 26 days ago
Yet Another Yet Another Bulletin Board.
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IAmGraydon 27 days ago
It would be pretty easy as forum software is relatively simple. If I were to do this, I would build it on Elixir/Phoenix so it's actually performant, not the React bloatware flavor of the month. Also, it would be interesting to spin this up as a FAAS (Forum as a Service) like Shopify, but for forums. The whole thing is managed and customers can spin up a forum with a custom domain and look/feel without worrying about the infrastructure. Maybe this exists already? I haven't looked into this space in many years.
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npmaker 27 days ago
It's almost like a ToDo app. We write them in every conceivable language just to kick the tires.

I just started a project with Phoenix/Elixir and I'm really excited about the concurrency and distributed nature of Erlang. I might have to try out making a forum, just for fun.

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jasonjayr 27 days ago
I think that way back when, there were SO MANY variants of the theme because the core parts of the software were pretty easy to get going. A lot of developers, new to the scene, would make a discussion forum. The devil's in the details, though, making sure things are secure, scalable, moderator tools are on point, etc.

Nowadays, a LLM could probably generate a new, functional forum software system in an hour, since their training have probably ingested a ton of variants of the same software.

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krapp 27 days ago
Sure. People post them all the time. Most are HN clones. All of them die with a whimper after the initial HN juice is gone.

The problem isn't technical, the problem is that social media and Reddit already do what people wanted forums to do, and did it better in many ways (albeit at the cost of centralization and homogeneity.) There is just no niche in the web ecosystem for old-school forums anymore, other than appeal to nostalgia.

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