phpBB deployments are still popular, among other places, on Tor hidden sites, because the Tor Browser disables client-side Javascript, and phpBB was written before Javascript was something you could architect a whole application around, so any JS functionality in phpBB is just optional graceful enhancement.

Forums were doing just fine during the golden age of Facebook, at least in my generation. I thought what made forums go belly-up was reddit. Once reddit became a mainstream social media, there was no need for niche forums as anyone could just create a subreddit.

Facebook did kill off some forums, where the built-in ability to invite or ad-target a very specific audience to a group in Facebook could grow a FB group quickly. Also, no friction of signup and verify email, etc.

Could be - at least the communities I used to participate in seem to use Discord now.

I really dislike using Discord and I can't even figure out why (so it's probably me). I do know it's not the part where it is a chat app per se - I'm happily using Zulip, managing with Slack, and WhatsApp, Telegram and Slack all have their place. But something about the UI/UX of chatting in Discord just makes it a stream of conversations where I can barely follow what's going on.

Having said that in many contexts a forum with threads that have a clear topic are just so much more of an appropriate solution than chat apps. I don't understand why people prefer the latter (although it does explain why I prefer Zulip since it manages to be a good hybrid in how it organizes discussions).

I'm in the same camp, discord and discourse just aren't useful to me

My number one issue with most of those forum "successors" is that everything is hidden behind a registration wall.

That means that they won't be indexed by search engines, so I cannot serendipitously stumble across them during a random web search in the first place, and even if I somehow learned about them, having to sign up merely to read some stuff is annoying.

Isn't that also true for Facebook groups?

I don't really like Discord, so I don't use it, and have no feedback on it.

I used to run a SimpleMachines forum, and we actually wanted to prevent the contents from being indexed.

I agree - very easy to lose track of something in the random chat that occurs. I use Discord because there's where some discussion I'm interested in happens though - not much choice sometimes.

Was early reddit code the bunch of arc macros and this here (hn) originally? Was it basically a fork of pg code for this?

It was (is?) Python: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

It was definitely lisp before it was python - they used to talk about a rewrite - one of the earliest reddits were the lisp reddits - my question is if it was Arc by Paul Graham or a seperate program in Common Lisp

Reddit was Common Lisp, not Arc (or Racket at all): https://web.archive.org/web/20060114065748/http://reddit.com...

Arc was released a few years after Reddit announced their Python rewrite anyways

Before the Python rewrite it was written on Common Lisp: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

It's the other way around. Reddit predates HN, and one of the reasons HN was made was to recreate early reddit culture (ref: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ycombinator.com/announc...).

Forums are still doing well in specialized communities. Model-specific car forums, for example. When your Lincoln Town Car starts making a "whoomp whoomp whoomp" noise, you can usually find the answer in one of these forums.

They are tremendously useful still, and they also contain a lot of esoteric domain-specific knowledge you can't find elsewhere.

Yeah I remember using lots of phpBB forums back in the mid 2000s but it seems like Discord is now the replacement.

The few forums that I still use seem to run vBulletin or Invision (both PHP bulletin boards but both paid software).

The forums I use seem to all be Discourse and XenForo these days.

I'm not sure I like Discourse's UX, but XenForo is made by former vB devs and seems nicer than modern vBulletin.

I wish it could come back, but I doubt it. A web site in that era covers the latest news to keep the site fresh, contains original resources, and has discussion forums. News went to news farms. Discussion forums moved to Reddit. Much of the original resources got straight up copied to Wikia.

Between the above and Google simply not sending traffic to small web sites, I am not sure if there could be any kind of a comeback.

Honestly, I think a lot of different services and systems have hurt forums popularity wise, though it happened in stages rather than all at once.

Facebook Groups did damage to communities aimed at older and less savvy audiences.

Stack Overflow likely replaced quite a few tech communities (as did its spinoffs in that network).

Reddit replaced a lot of forums for niche topics and hobbies.

And Discord seems to have taken over for a lot of 'young person focused' topics like games, film, tv shows, web series, etc.

Discord has basically annihilated about two of those services as well as many smaller communities too. Stack Overflow is losing out to Discord servers (and possibly Slack instances) aimed at the users of a specific framework or language, and many of Reddit's communities seem to be switching over to there too.

I just got reminded of why I almost never visit Stack Overflow anymore.

Asked a pretty basic question, and immediately got two close votes; probably because it was a short, basic question.

It did get answered, though, as opposed to being ignored, like so many questions.

It’s turned into a fairly dark, nasty, unpleasant place.