03-04-2018, 12:15 PM
I love forums!
However, I think forums aren't in too great of a state at the moment. The Internet has changed a bunch but most free forum software out there hasn't evolved much since IPB 1.3 was released in 2004. There's a lot of room for improvement! Especially considering chatrooms, which I think most people though was a solved issue, got huge enhancements relatively recently with what Slack and Discord did to modernize what had been more-or-less the same for around 20 years with IRC. The closest forums get to this is with Discourse, but for various reasons (one being infinite scrolling- yuck!) I'm not a fan at all.
The closest I've seen to a real modern rethinking of forums is Twist, but that's for businesses (both by design and by pricing) and wasn't really created to improve forums- it was actually built to solve the nightmare of using Slack for companies and was mainly focused on bringing the best of both worlds from email and Slack together.
Social networks and chatrooms are far from a replacement for the place in my heart for forums. Hopefully organized, archivable conversation can make a comeback soon.
However, I think forums aren't in too great of a state at the moment. The Internet has changed a bunch but most free forum software out there hasn't evolved much since IPB 1.3 was released in 2004. There's a lot of room for improvement! Especially considering chatrooms, which I think most people though was a solved issue, got huge enhancements relatively recently with what Slack and Discord did to modernize what had been more-or-less the same for around 20 years with IRC. The closest forums get to this is with Discourse, but for various reasons (one being infinite scrolling- yuck!) I'm not a fan at all.
The closest I've seen to a real modern rethinking of forums is Twist, but that's for businesses (both by design and by pricing) and wasn't really created to improve forums- it was actually built to solve the nightmare of using Slack for companies and was mainly focused on bringing the best of both worlds from email and Slack together.
Social networks and chatrooms are far from a replacement for the place in my heart for forums. Hopefully organized, archivable conversation can make a comeback soon.
![[-]](https://forums.mfgg.net/images/emerald/collapse.png)