As someone who still consumes threads like that, it's part of the charm and beauty. None of the stuff is ranked/upvoted/liked, no one is competing to have the most followers, just conversations/arguments between humans for the sake of communication and understanding. Requires a bit more time and effort to read, true, but everyone being equal makes it feel like a pretty OK tradeoff, at least for me.

Of course, not all forums are like that, some still have vanity-metrics, but at least the forums I still participate work like that.

There's rarely reasons for that.

Example on MBWorld:

https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/

Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum):

https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13

I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions.

They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads.

> it's not suitable for tickets (jira)

You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH.

With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far.

I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever.

Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.

I think the major advantage of old forums is the community. You don’t really get the sense of community on a large network, which causes a host of other problems.

  1: https://web.archive.org/web/20170728043031/https://egg.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/jisaku/1478413388/  
  2: https://web.archive.org/web/20170715143439/http://egg.2ch.net/jisaku/subback.html

You're 100% right though, it's not suitable for real time communication. I wouldn't want it to be. Facebook groups have "chats" now, and it's mega impossible to keep up, and nobody actually reads them.

Agree :) Consensus in the development community seems to be "Everything should be in Discord/Slack/Teams", so moving towards what you mention would be great.

> I think that's where the real problem lies

That certainly does sound like an issue, but I cannot say I've ever experienced it myself, maybe I've been lucky. At "worst", sometimes there is one tool for private/internal use, but for public community, Discord would be chosen, for example. But never "We're using both Slack and Teams internally", that'd be crazy.

The number of times a development community I want to join is exclusively on Discord though, instead of a public forum, is something I constantly encounter.

Sounds like a theme issue rather than vBulletin issue. Most of the vBulletin forums (of yore at least) were so heavily customized you couldn't even tell it was vBulletin, except for the ever present smileys :rolleyes:

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that normally works, is that you go to the last post you remember reading, then continue from there. So start at last page, go back until you remember what you're coming across, continue reading from there.

Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though, the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.

It's not because of the threaded comments with vanity-metrics, I can tell you that :) I've gone as far as to write my own HN client that displays HN comments as a flat list of comments, sorted by date that also folds in whatever they replied to as a proper quote, so you can follow along. Looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/TNfg9Vg.png

Surely, I cannot be alone in sometimes going extreme lengths to remove this sort of pointless popularity sorting?

I surely am not the only one that often skips to comments without even reading the article, which is tantamount to saying “I don’t have time to form my own opinion. Tell me what to believe about this topic”

It's a good place to talk stuff that's popular, but discussions fade and die quickly.

Also, I still use vBulletin-like forums.

Examples from the last decade I still use: mbworld.org for discussing Mercedes cars, bitcointalk, hwupgrade, overclockers.uk and some others.

Reddit/Twitter absolutely cannot replace any of those I listed for long lasting specific discussions, they are just unfit.

"X but in Rust" seems like the primary purpose for Rust to exist as far as I can tell.