I enjoy the way forums work and how they’re laid out. I also love how useful they are, especially when so many companies are replacing their entire communities with a Discord channel, which is less than ideal. I only use a few forums, but I’d like to find some more to browse through, it doesn’t matter the topic!
My wee list:
- TIGSource Forums - Video game developers big and small post here, there’s even a section for showcasing work-in-progress projects which is really cool.
- The Metal Archives Forums - The main site is pretty much the gold standard for metal music cataloguing. The forums are obviously about the metal genre, too.
- Cook’d and Bomb’d - This is a comedy aficionado forum. It’s about all comedy, but it originally focused on the work of Chris Morris (Brass Eye, The Day Today).
EDIT: “Meal” to “metal” 🤦
I enjoy http://tildes.net/ Old style, but with a modern design. You’ll see what I mean.
If you have a Gemini browser such as Lagrange, then gemini://bbs.geminispace.org is one of the better forums there.
Tildes is not an old school forum. It’s just a reddit clone. Nothing of age is bumped to the top.
It’s not a Reddit clone.
The post asks for old “style” forums. Not just forums that are actually old.
I believe old style means linear threads and other oldschool UI choices, not just look/aesthetics. That one has tree comment structure similar to all redditlikes, which (I believe) is relatively a recent invention? Have you seen comment trees like this few decades ago?
The discourse on Tildes is nothing like Reddit thanks to the web design and moderation choices made there. Interactions there are blissfully mature and intentional compared to what goes on over on Reddit. Also, take a look at Tildes and count how many thumbnails you see. It’s just not interesting to anyone with a short attention span who wants to plaster memes around the place.
I get what you’re saying about some UI similarities, but people don’t visit sites to click on user interface components. They’re there for an experience and for that reason Tildes is not like Reddit at all.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
It’s %100 a clone of old.reddit.com
The guy worked for reddit for 4 years, dude didn’t like that reddit was a “safe space” for assholes. So he left made tildes and now bans basically anyone he disagrees with.
That sounds like an exaggeration to me, but the place is healthier than most. Maybe he’s banning the right people.
It was nice, the problem is he bans people who like to discuss anything, present facts, and you get banned if it goes against his political beliefs by any matter.