I don't like all the centralization happening and reddit becoming the forum for everything.

forum is a place for discussion, not a RPG where you collect achievements

Hopefully the giants that are always espousing security will see the light.

I use Nitter https://nitter.net/

Because I absolutely hate it's UX. 95% of the times I stumble on a Discourse forum I immediately close the tab.

I miss old-school paginated, hierarchical forums. It's kinda like old vs new reddit.

I recently looked at forum software for a community I was trying to set up and it felt like it's either stuck in the past or went too far with shiny web stuff (like discourse).

Just wanted a middle ground - oldschool style just less cluttered and less unnecessary info. Did I miss something? Did no one figure it out?

I've tried several times, but I cannot get it to show me a view that is useful. IE, what's new. Instead I get some algorithm that is determining hotness, which doesn't seem to ever change.

I've tried the mailing list mode, and a forum that I thought was dead was absolutely too much chatter for email. I tried the web interface again and was lost again.

The fact that many projects and people I respect choose discourse implies to me that I'm the one who is missing something. But maybe it's a collective mirage.

Pagination: yes, it's not the best but you can click and drag the slider on the right: https://forum.open-services.net/t/introduce-yourself/21/7 (the one that says 7/31). The (bookmarkable) URL will change when you release that slider. You can also click on "Aug 2017" which is a sort of the first page and "26d ago" that brings you to the last "page"

Mailing list mode: I recommend to use a weekly activity digest (Under /u/YourUsernameHere/preferences/emails) and under favorite categories you select "Watching First Post" (under the bell icon in the top right).

But no, you are not missing anything. Most of forum systems come with notification dials set to the max that you need to dial back a bit.

Perhaps the Discourse forum you visited had Top as the default view? Usually it's Latest which is the topics which most recently had a reply. When you create an account on the forum you should have the New and Unread views available as well, which are tailored to your user account.

That's odd. This is definitely something it can do, and in my experience it is the default view or at least easily available. E.g., the front page of llllllll.co is just that.

I no longer close my tabs when I see Discourse, I just tap uBlock and the "</>" button. It may not have as many bells and whistles of the PHP forums of yore, but it works as is quite easy to use. My deepest thanks to the good hearted soul inside Discourse who in my imagination fought tirelessly for that to happen.

It was hands-down the easiest to install, and is the easiest to maintain. Self-hosting on Linode or Digital Ocean is cheap and easy.

If you set it up right, it can act like an e-mail listserv as well. I have one instance where we migrated an old e-mail only community over to a private discourse (need to login before seeing any content). About half of the users just use e-mail to interact with discourse, including replying to threads, etc.

I'm glad an option exists that modern users find at least palatable if the alternative is _no_ internet forums. It would be far worse if all we had were Discord communities. At least Discourse is less transient than that.

Still an opportunity here I think. The feeling of persistence that classic internet forums (phpBB, xenForo, etc.) give us with modern quality-of-life features is a software I dream about building.

Wow, I've always been put off by Discourse forums and wasn't sure what the reason was. That's it!

Maybe it's the way they use tags to store/structure things rather than the folder structure used by other forum software.

It appears to be a perfectly integrated web forum / NNTP / mailing list system.

Edit: re. the opportunity, in the spirit of times - maybe what's missing is a "headless" forum framework with a byoFE?

I think Discourse and NodeBB are winning for now, yes.

Easier in quotes because it is actually a lot more difficult (for me). The excess white space and lack of differentiation between bits of content just make it harder to follow conversations. I might have brain problems, I dunno, but I struggle with it in any case.

But what I dislike more is companies and projects abandoning GitHub issues for Discourse forums. The disconnect between source and issue is frustrating as someone that files a fair number of detailed issues. Issues that, btw, require enough information that I end up using GitHub anyway (gists).

AGPL, no js required, accessible, has mailing list and nntp interfaces

https://github.com/epilys/sic/

I think this problem has been raised a few times. But the response was theme it the way you like. Discourse is flexible. I generally dont think this is a good argument because most people just use it the way by default.

Really wish they hire some design guy to work on it.

I miss old-school mailing lists where I can read and write to them with whatever client I want.

The downside is that they auto-subscribe me to weekly emails when I sign up (which is illegal in a lot of places!). I think this can be changed away from the default by the instance owner but like most default settings it usually isn't changed.

There was even an attempt at "forum hierarchy plugin" for that oldschool style but it was soon abandoned.

Forem is similar in the lack of hierarchies. Focuses too much on the now.

I don't mind the UI. I have nostalgia for old school forums (I used to operate one back around 2008-2012), but I'm happy enough with discourse.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

I'd say WoltLab Suite (https://www.woltlab.com/en/) matches that description. The forum part of the software is not free/OSS, though. There is also other modern, commercial, PHP-based forum software that would match your description (XenForo).

Disclosure: WoltLab is my employer.

https://forum.catto5k.com/features/

    æternity blockchain is an Erlang-based scalable smart contract platform engineered by programming pioneers to address some of the most fundamental challenges native to earlier blockchains. By redesigning blockchain technology at the protocol level, the æternity developer community has enabled the core protocol to understand and integrate a rich set of functionalities out of the box.

But I'm curious-- given that you seem to consider online web-based fora to be outmoded & anachronistic-- what in your mind would be representative of the new hotness?