Arantor

The main issue is having hosting that actually offers ElasticSearch (or, hosting it separately on something like Bonsai). ES wants plenty of memory so you tend to be in decent VPS territory from the start. If it were feasible, I’d bake that into the core - it’d do XF wonders to have it as standard but it immediately reduces the hosting choices considerably.

Define best. I’d say that XF Cloud and Invision Cloud have things to recommend both of them (esp Invision Cloud which has features not available in the self hosted edition) if you’re looking for a more traditional forum experience. Circle has a lot going for it if you’re aiming for a more social network type feel, and it has video features that the self hosters mostly only dream of. I find it funny how much they talk up their customisation features but in reality compared to self hosting (or even Jcink/Proboards/Forumotion) it’s actually a bit tame. Popular with people who have a diverse community backing where the community itself has little in common with each other - think fan communities/promo sites for singers in bands. (This was my first exposure to Circle was the official fan club of Floor Jansen (Nightwish’s lead singer), FloorWorld.) I’ve also heard mention of HiveBrite but I have yet to see any in action and yet to fully decipher the extreme corporate nonsense that is their website.

This is getting more surreal. Matt posted on the official Twitter account thanking WooCommerce for their sponsorship of Automattic. Guess who owns WooCommerce? If you said Automattic, you'd be right! And if you think WPE are going to add this to the list of things, you'd also be right! (They've also pointed out the wonderful quotes from Matt's interview with TechCrunch where he admits to trying to cause WPE damage, the very thing the injunction is for)

Hey :)

Also worth noting that with social media, we haven’t evolved to understand what we have made. Humans have been a social species, for the most part, forever. The need to live in groups and maintain social contact long since evolved beyond survival (food, shelter, safety etc) into something more intangible. But humanity has yet to evolve the capacity to truly understand the hyper connected world we have wrought. Facebook, X, etc are firehoses (indeed the Twitter API was once literally called this), where what is unleashed is a torrent of opinion, communication etc. - one needs to quench their social thirst, to fill their communal bucket but the firehose is a quantity we have no idea how to deal with, emotionally or psychologically. When you can ask a question and get hundreds or thousands of opinions in response, how do you deal with that? Forums are faucets (taps), you don’t get a torrent of volume of water, but a pace that you can drink from, and you can fill your bucket. You can ask a question and get sufficient response to move forward without being drowned in a sea of them.

Interesting how much faith you have in the XF team to be so bold. Commendable, but I think a trifle overly-hopeful. You’d think, you’d actually think, but in practice this isn’t nearly as true as you’d believe (source: implemented this exact functionality in Wedge and my SMF gallery for organising albums, and seen it done countless times over the years) What happens in practice is that you end up fighting to get things to be the correct sub level or setting one thing as a sub board of another by accident, and trying to balance that ends up causing you to make it clunkier by deliberately making it harder to do one of the things over the other. DnD when you have a single tier of items and it’s purely ordering is fine. It’s the nesting part that kills people, every single time. I can tell you the answer right now: for such functionality, less than 20% of users use it, and once you eliminate technical forums with power users, this number goes down to low single digits. This is based on all the forums I worked with in the last 15 years of working with SMF including my time in support and dev. It’s actually trended lower in recent years as people increasingly assume they get what they’re given and deal with it, just the same way it works in practice with social media.

Yes, but that's not the point. It won't be for end users to customise their experience. On the other hand, it's perfectly suited to all the people who have motor control issues (of which there are surprisingly many), the folks who have limited vision and rely on screen readers and other assistive technologies (also surprisingly many, far more than we want to pretend), and doesn't have any issues working on mobile. I guess you weren't around for the era when the Google homepage was customisable with (many) widgets and how virtually no-one used it. It's actually mirrored in more recent times by the Apple vs Android debate - Android owners would go on at length about how customisable their devices were and Apple owners had a habit of 'and? Even if I had it I wouldn't use it'. Heck, even on forums that let you collapse categories, baked into the core software, the majority of users don't. Some because they don't know it's there, some because they don't care that it's there. Numbers for which is which are hard to pin down, however. (Getting numbers of users who don't use the functionality is trivial enough because the preferences for this get stored, naturally, because that's needed to make it work.)

I used to really, really enjoy building the tools to help connect people and to enable people to do cool things. At some point I got really jaded because there's a fundamental 'eh what even is the point any more, nothing is going to succeed' fatalism about the whole endeavour.

I doubt XF 3 will provide a more social format. I also doubt quite strongly that it'll give user customisation in that regard, let alone drag and drop. I could see better placement by admins though. Curating the user experience is really where the future is - such as there is one - but it needs to be infinitely better signposted than previous attempts in other markets to allow for it otherwise users won't know it's there, or won't care.

People always did this, none of this is new, but I will absolutely concede that social media has accentuated the effects of it; the fact people curate their life for posting, the rise of influencers (especially food influencers) and the push for "living your best life" makes this more exaggerated than it used to be, but people have always done it. Even this isn't really that new a take. Big Yellow Taxi sounds like it could have been written this year but it's 22 years old, easily predating social media, though the sentiment is - ironically - much the same point, about the results of civilisation and in particular capitalism vs the things we hold dear. This. So much this. The big corporations seem utterly hell-bent on selling us all down the river for their bottom line, and will erode away all the mom & pop stores in every industry if it makes them more money in the long run.

You should always assume the admin can access the PMs because they're responsible legally for what happens on the platform they run, self-hosted or otherwise.

Some SMF themes do it for the info centre on the front page for that exact set of functionality. I took this concept to town in Moodle, though: it’s very common there to build things with blocks, both in courses and user dashboards, and scroll-of-death course pages are pretty normal. So I created a block that could hold other blocks and outline their presentation. You can still see the screenshots of the things it let people do: https://moodle.org/plugins/block_multiblock (It was hell to implement, mostly for supporting the course backup/restore feature Moodle has)

What would be really good is if you could present the sidebars in a way that didn't consume allllll the height. You want to display that supplementary information? Make it an accordion. Tabs. Other collapsible formats exist. Let people hide the ones that don't interest them, use that as the start of a curated experience.

In fact, I'm actually going to follow up on the above, and get way more nuanced about it. Market Readjustment: back in the 2000s, there were a lot of forums set up that, with hindsight, shouldn't have been forums. Result: more growth than expected, leading to a harder fall in the aftermath, which makes it look worse than it ever truly was. What do I mean by that? Well, there's no shortage of use cases that better tools came to exist to support. MMORPG guilds used to have forums, but often they were glorified calendars pointing out raid schedules, forum posts with meta builds or meta build expectations, and directions to chat services like Ventrilo, and used the forum to manage access to resources. Result: Discord came along and ate their lunch because in reality most guilds just don't need a forum and never did. A Discord server gives these groups voice chat, somewhere to document the things that they need, and while it's lacking a calendar, that's not insurmountable. Meanwhile, things like local physical communities would find themselves a home on Facebook. This is not 'social media' winning the war as much as it is 'the network effect' - Facebook, at least in the early days, was all about connecting you with people you knew, and friends of friends. Natural network effect kicks in for local communities where you'll know local people and friends of friends are natural networks at work. Forums don't come with that built in effect, and you see this playing out even on Reddit where Facebook will win hands down for such things in a way even Reddit doesn't. Boutique vs mall: a forum is like a boutique. What we used to call mom & pop shops. They don't stock everything, what they do stock might not be at the cheapest price, but if they have it, you can get it right there, right then. If they don't, they can probably get it for you, and they know what they're selling if you need advice. Going to social media or Reddit is like buying from Amazon, or a mall. Thousands of choices, all available instantly, but harder to care about anything, it's more sterile, guarantee they don't care if you can't get what you need, and advice is questionable at best. And worse, the ubiquity of the Amazons and the malls have been pushing out the mom & pop stores for a while - after a while there won't be any, and then there will be nothing left but to lament what we lost, in exchange for big businesses getting bigger. (Shop at your local, owner-operated stores if you can. Once they're gone, they won't be coming back.) The same thing is happening to communities; why start a real community building connections with other people when you can have the cheaper knock-off with less effort on Reddit or social media? Don't like the community there? Roll the dice and find another one. The fast food effect: Social media in particular demonstrated that people don't care much about formatting, that it's more important to post and move on, with as little friction as possible. Of course it is: the quicker to get you off you writing something and the quicker they can get you to an ad. Or some other engagement whereby you raise your own value to them by teaching it better who you are, so when you do see an ad, it costs the advertiser more because it's more precisely targeted to you. Did you want a Big Mac or a McSandwich? Then they introduced adding pictures, makes you take more notice, means that they can better see what you're taking time looking at vs moving on. Easier data gathering. Have some more fries, the salt's good for you. And of course with the infinite scroll there's always more to see, more to consume, regardless of its taste. The point is to keep showing you things you react to, so you interact, and tune the algorithm better for maximising the value you provide when you get shown ads. Here, have your bottomless refills on soda. I want what you're selling (market readjustment II): the other interesting factor that we don't talk about is the push in the early 2000s of the hobbyist making a buck or two. It wasn't a big deal to make a forum (or, for that matter a blog), put it out there, get people in and make a few bucks as a side hustle with ads. But that only works when you're not competing with the world and their dog. And we definitely saw a rush of people seeing that money could be made this way, that it hadn't occurred to them before, and before you know it, a gold rush was in the making. Best position to be in there was the shovel seller - Jelsoft, Invision Power Services and co certainly had shovels to sell you for the gold rush. But eventually people realise not everyone will strike it rich, not everyone will find more than a nugget; not everyone will even achieve that much. But while it lasts, it swells the market bigger than it should be - and people who wouldn't normally take notice, suddenly take notice. ------ Where am I going with all this? If you're in the camp that forums should be more like social media, how would that play out? Easier to post images? Easier to post videos? Hope you have a big storage plan on your server for that, because you're the one paying for it. Better question: what's the aim of hosting images and videos? Social media wants this because it produces engagement. Not discussion, that's not the point. It produces a stream of images and videos that you can look at. And then in between the images and videos you can show an ad, bigger ad, video ad. More money on the table for that. It's all about normalising you seeing ads. Are you going to monetise your community the same way? If not, why not? If not, is engagement a meaningful metric to be chasing? For social media, engagement is its lifeblood - but it doesn't really care what the engagement is about. Your community has a focus, dare I say it, it has a point to its existence. Social media doesn't have that, it exists to exist, it exists to drive engagement about anything and everything - as long as it lets them show you ads. Even if hypothetically we talk about making the posting experience better for media, we need to talk about the tradeoffs. If you really want to make it as frictionless as social media does, your users have to give up control of presentation. Now, for many users that's fine, an acceptable tradeoff, but for plenty on the forum side, it's not. Consider the side effects carefully of this: consider how rich the experience of quoting other people is, to indicate reply content, on social media. Consider moreover the notion of long-form replies basically don't exist on social media. Maybe that's the style of discussion you want, maybe it isn't, but streamlining the experience guarantees you producing more of one than the other. What about competing with Reddit or social media on the 'everything under one roof'? You can't. Deal with it. Don't be that mom & pop cafe that isn't doing well and every time they're not doing well, they add more things to the menu so they do more things less well. Pick your niche, focus on it, be the best in your niche - be the local mom & pop shop that is the expert in the field. You cannot, and should not, be competing with Reddit because you can't compete with all of Reddit. At best, you can compete with a few subreddits that are relevant in the niche. But that's it. Similarly, you can't compete with Facebook, just the subset of Facebook Groups that overlap. Understand this. Internalise this. Pick your battles. What about competing with social media in the dopamine addiction stakes? Sure, you can gamify content creation and content consumption, but you're unlikely to produce the recurrent effect of regular engagement that Facebook et al thrives on. That dripfeeding of reactions to content to keep you coming back, doomscrolling in the dead time between notifications, just waiting for the next drip of dopamine hitting your pleasure receptors. I don't think you can meaningfully compete with this, in the same way that fresh fruit juice is never going to compete with Coke for the #1 spot in drinks. I'm not convinced you want to, either, but that leads me to the inevitable. Of course, then we need to talk about the dead internet theory. The dead internet theory is a position that the majority of online discourse is by bots, for bots, and that the actual number of humans talking is getting smaller and smaller every day. And with the rise of AI, I can certainly see how that might come to pass, but it's definitely been a question on my mind for some time. We've all seen the spammers, we've all seen the lurkers. One wonders how many real people are left online to post. I wonder how close we are to a point where a majority of content is produced by bots, consumed by bots and with marginal inputs from humans leading to marginal outputs. Already people use AI to write documents, pass them to other people, who then use AI to consume the document rather than reading it - which just means we could cut half the loop and all the power consumption that we burned to do all that. What this means for forums though? Part of me says they're the mom & pop shops of old, and that once they're gone, they're gone and that we should support them, but I wonder if we already reached the point where it doesn't matter any more. Every conversation I bump into on the nature of 'can another forum software break into the market', the answer is no. As I said, I don't believe the problem with forums is the lack of evolution of the format. I believe the problem is the people. People don't want to talk any more, they want to shout, to proselytise. They've all been taught by social media that if you don't agree, you must disagree, that it's them and us. Social media has bred the notion that people can curate and create their own perfect echo chamber in which to have every idea reinforced and saturated in between the ads. Where's the nuanced discussion supposed to go? Answer: nowhere, because it's not feeding the machine, it's not showing them ads, it's not feeding the money cycle. I've been building forum and community tools for many years now. I think I might finally be cured, because an increasing number of people don't want to use them. If it's not the tools they're already using, it doesn't matter. No new blood is permitted in the market - and the big players would quite like it if we all just gave up and joined them already. (And it's not about my capacity as a developer; I'm still in plenty of demand for websites and apps.) What I find really funny is that the people most vocally decrying new tools coming into the market (shooting them down before they ever get chance), are the same people who criticise the existing tools for not being good enough. One wonders what these people imagine are the correct tools, because I suspect a number of them are using forums when perhaps they shouldn't be. In the meantime, I'm going to try and find an alternative hobby because after all these years, it's time to set this one aside in the hopes of a better time to come when the skills will be needed again.

I am currently only a little forum owner (less than 1k posts) with no plans to grow rapidly.

It's basically vB 5 with a new theme. Given that vB 5 didn't exactly set the world on fire, vB 6 isn't showing signs of doing so either.

I'll agree with 2010 as the tipping point. I don't agree with the reasoning. I have a much more wild theory: that it's nothing to do with the format, but the content. Forums tend to focus on a single subject and the subject matter around that subject. Social media lets everyone focus on themselves, and then showing them more content like that directly tying to their interests. Combine that with the inherent need to keep people 'engaged' rather than actually having conversations and you have a recipe for disaster. I don't believe the issue is really that forums haven't evolved as much as it is that forums are fundamentally less interesting to most people because it doesn't inherently try to tap into the dopamine feedback loop. And worse, forums are never, ever going to be able to catch that up without becoming something else.

Welcome to the party! 🎉

I've never really thought about doing guerilla marketing for a forum before, or indeed for sites in general. When I've seen some things done, it usually seems to get a 'huh' reaction and people then move on rather than it being a meaningful conversion.

They call it a forum, but it really isn't, it's just a way to collect a bunch of clumps of chat together. In the strictest Darwinian sense I guess you could 'call' it a forum but it never feels like one.

I'm like that rock you get at the seaside, if you were to look at my bones you'd see the word 'forums' running along them!

Love where this is going, keep it up!

Remember, even if you say it 100 times, it might be that 100th time that is the trigger to do something with it.

We're actually surprisingly aligned on a lot of things without having to talk about it, and we've always taken the view that if either of us has a strong feeling about something that isn't matched, we talk about it like adults. But we only met in our 30s, and we've never really had a big row about anything (not even when working together to assemble IKEA furniture)

My experience, such as it is, is that next-of-kin don't particularly want to take over the account, beyond a last message about how much the site meant, where relevant. Much more common is just to lock the account down and be done with it.