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POPOSYS | 3 years ago
One thing that really went wrong: people using forums as issue trackers.
Just look at the mega topics that exist for one $thing with never-ending addition of posts that are a nightmare to search and extract knowledge from. Instead of using an issue tracker, they post more and more messages to the one forum topic dedicated to $thing. Some hardware related forums still do that. Ultra long topics with hundreds of posts, somewhere between page 157-178 there are some nuggets you will never find.
Also the extremely annoying UIs - as an example look at the minimal navigation / pagination buttons in many forums. Well, OK, that started to change slowly, but still we have horrible UIs everywhere. Annoyances like most space on a forum page still wasted for unimportant side information do exist - some designs are so bad that the most important information has the smallest font size.
But while the good old slick and dirty PHP forums still delivered with all that warts, mostly because these people still knew how to program fast software, then came the ruby programmers and brought us a vision of forum software that should get a premium lifetime award for coding horrors. JS heavy frontend with grotesque front-end anti-patterns and a monstrous bloated backend that breaks when your forum actually has some attention. The time of "internet software as a satirical art form" has not stopped until today.
So hopefully the old-school PHP devs can easily iron out the annoyances of the past and still deliver internet software that is fast and usable.
Happy release party, PhpBB!
antifa|3 years ago
That's basically the default experience of discord.
sourcecodeplz|3 years ago
Yep, you have to go through each page to find them all, it's called research.