Forums are dead! And they have been dead for the past ten years. Yet, at the same time they are pretty much alive, like Schrödinger’s cat. Even in 2024, as soon as you leave the known environment of social media — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and what not else — as soon, as you search for something online, there is a high chance that Google will send you to: a forum.
Forums (or, fora), defined the early days of the public internet. In an age before social media; before smartphone apps and all the various platforms we bide our time on nowadays, there was little else to do on the internet other than checking out forums. In a way, forums were the direct successor to mailing lists, and the predecessor of platforms like Facebook and Twitter. However, just as mailing lists are still pretty much alive today, forums are, too. They have just become invisible, like mailing lists.
The Linux Kernel developers — those folks who develop the core of the operating system this very blog runs on —, for example, still communicate only via email. They archive everything, to be sure, but they never used a forum. Even patch notes are still sent to the maintainers via email. Linux is not on GitHub, or any modern platform. Everything still runs on email. But most other software projects have moved on to different, more modern platforms. We don’t see these mailing lists, even though they are still vital for many important parts of our modern infrastructure.
Just as mailing lists went out of favor for the public, forums, too, went out of favor. But they didn’t go out of favor because nobody needed them anymore. Rather, other services have attempted to take over their functionality. What has happened on forums now happens on closed down social media platforms. Facebook, Discord, Slack — all these modern alternatives to forums allow roughly the same things as forums. But they do so in private, locked away from the public. And all the knowledge of humanity that has been preserved in public for more than two decades, is slowly being handed in to proprietary databases whose primary use is not to keep it open, but to make money.
Yet, forums are still everywhere. They are the mycelium of the modern web; hidden from view, yet essential to the functioning of the digital society. If forums were to die away completely, so, too, would large swathes of collective human knowledge, ossified in layer upon layer in obscure corners of the internet. Without forums, everyone would have to start from scratch when trying to understand the more mundane parts of our surrounding technology.
The Purpose of Forums
I don’t exactly know when or how forums first came to be, but I remember that my first contact with the internet was via forums. In the late 1990s, in an age where 56K modems were still prevalent,1 I remember the badly designed HTML structures; table layouts all over the place, and in those tables mountains upon mountains of posts and replies. Forums contained pages-long discussions on the most ridiculous topics from ornithology to debates on the newest Märklin engines.
The term “forum” in Latin (hence technically “fora,” not “forums”) means marketplace, or town square. It denotes a public place on which citizens meet and discuss. The old Greeks understood this as a political place, albeit I would argue that it is good that modern forums are usually not too political.
Forums are one of the most simple technical software-concoctions we can devise. You need a username and a password to log in, and then you just type away in plain text, maybe with “BBCodes,” Markdown in newer engines. In fact, forums are so simple to program that one of my very first software projects — somewhere during the summer of 2006 — was a forum. And it worked. It wasn’t the most beautiful or secure pieces of software, but it worked. That’s how simple forums are.
The focus of forums is on question-response type interactions. Anybody who starts a new thread does so because they want to receive responses, not despite. In a way, forums are the anti-Twitter: Instead of barking hot-takes out into the open and then lock down the replies once people start throwing poop at each other, you take your time to create a measured post, and likewise receive measured responses. Now, of course, trolling and hate-speech haven’t been invented on Twitter; and so this is merely an ideal-typical example for how a forum is supposed to work, which is not always realistic. But more often than not, forums are containers of actually useful information.
I don’t think that the primary use-case of forums, the one usage that has helped make forums resilient in an age of social media, is to be a town square. Instead, I think that forums have survived because they are knowledge bases. There are not too many ways of creating knowledge digitally. One way is to edit a Wikipedia-article. What we see on Wikipedia is the culmination of many people working on perfecting an informational piece on something or someone. The other way is to write documentation; the manuals that software developers always complain users never read. Finally, forums combine these two approaches: You don’t have a single, distilled article that serves you exactly the knowledge you require, but it is usually much more precise as documentations written by few people for the many.
Most forums that are useful in our modern technological age are those that provide help and support for users of software and hardware. Documentation is typically the product of a very small group of people with the difficult task of conveying a program’s functionality via words to people who cannot be expected to have deep understanding of the underlying technology. Documentation writers will often make mistakes; assume that users know something when in fact they don’t. One reason many people don’t read documentation is frustration, because the documentation doesn’t help them fix issues.
This is where forums can shine: They are a form of documentation, but generated by users. Someone had a problem — likely the one you also experience — and they asked a question. And, together, the forum community worked towards a solution, until the original poster (OP) finally exclaimed: “That fixed the issue. Thanks!” Now you, too, can follow the forum thread years later, and not only find the solution, but also learn a lot more about the software along the way.
Three Challenges to Forums
How did forums fall out of favor? Why did we collectively abandon them? It certainly isn’t because they aren’t useful anymore. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have that many still in operation. Is it because they’re … old by today’s standards? That seems to be part of the answer. But there are other issues, too. In fact, I believe that forums have been dealt three distinct blows over the past decade.
The first is the emergence of social media and messengers. Our communication has moved. While in the early 2000s, most internet users used it to find and share information, nowadays, it’s mostly about doomscrolling your favorite time killer app. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok: Each generation has its own poison, and none of it is about curating knowledge. These apps are essentially garbage collectors. Millions of people produce billions of Instagram pictures, 99% of which are doomed to end up in the garbage can of history. The same applies to other platforms, albeit with differing types of media. They aren’t designed to create knowledge, they are created to entertain in the short-time. And then there are messengers. We often do not turn to the internet anymore when facing issues — we ask our colleagues, friends, or family. Again, this is knowledge that essentially remains private, never to be shared.
In all of these cases, information is stored (semi-)privately. To access it, you have to create an account in the best case, and be part of someone’s family in the worst. As our communication went out of public view, we abandoned the publicity of forums. There was an interesting take on “Pod Save America” in the run-up to the U.S. election this year, where the hosts explained that campaigners today have to rely on people conveying information via messenger. WhatsApp as a battlefield for votes; a statement that would’ve sounded absurd just ten years ago. But for spreading misinformation, messengers work well, as exemplified by the heavy usage of Telegram for right-wing actors.
This was the first blow for forums: We only have limited waking hours, and if an app can withdraw two of those hours each day, this is less time we can spend hunting for information online, or contribute to the collective human knowledge.
The second blow dealt to forums was a shift towards real-time messaging apps for providing support. Ten years ago, most software packages had some forum where you could sign up to outline a problem and get help from other users. Often you didn’t even have to sign up, because the solution was already there. Nowadays, most software provides a link to a Discord server. However, Discord is not a forum, regardless of how much it tries. To access most servers, you have to have your phone number registered, which is unusually intrusive (but arguably necessary to counter the amounts of spam). Also, if someone had an issue and received help from someone, how can you find that again? On forums, you usually have a thread title, akin to an email subject, that can be edited to show precisely what issue a thread is about. You don’t have that on Discord. In essence, you will have to post the question anew whenever you join a Discord server, regardless of how often the issue has already been solved. It may seem nice that people respond much more quickly than on forums, but in the end it is a form of individual-centered communication where you expect someone to quickly respond, and don’t care about whether people who follow after you will find that question again.
Then, there was a third blow. As more of our activity went online, so did the dangers of our virtual lives bleeding through into our real lives. Credit card fraud, impersonation, doxxing, and many other harmful behavior prompted legislatures worldwide to enact privacy-related legislation. In an attempt to hold the big tech companies accountable and ensure they do enough to keep their users safe, legislation has also thrown individual forum-owners under the bus who just want to facilitate discussions for some fringe hobby. Today, everyone needs to have some terms of service, and the GDPR puts a lot of responsibility on an individual’s plate — even for an ornithology forum.2 This has dissuaded the proliferation of forums. Essentially, legislation trusts neither users nor forum administrators enough to just let them make decisions. This means more liability and bureaucracy for admins, and fewer forums to sign up for users. In fact, I have written rules and terms several times in my life for various hobbyist websites, and just trying to write down and adapt a terms of service page takes entire days out of my life.
The Weird Non-Death of phpBB
But forums never went away. As other platforms proliferated, forums just kept on rolling (in the deep of the internet). And with them, the software they run on. One of the oldest pieces of software, one that I have used over and over, is phpBB. Having created “BBCodes,” I was surprised to find that it is still in active development. The program is over twenty years old at this point. But this goes to show how resilient software can be. But it is also a bit sad. Even though the concept of the forum is very old, I believe that refreshing its layout is important from time to time. One does not have to abandon the concept of sub-forums, or categories, when introducing a “timeline”-style layout for new threads.
Take, for example Discourse. Today, Discourse seems to be the most prolific software to run forums on. And it is even Open Source! So everyone can use it! … right? Well, here is the problem. Because forums are only that – the bedrock of the internet – most people don’t care too much about how to set something up. Function here goes clearly over form. So when you want a forum, phpBB is still as robust as a tank. But when you want something that looks more modern, you quickly run out of options. Forum software is not a competitive field, and that has two reasons. The first is that those who need a forum often just fall back to phpBB or Discourse and trade visuals versus robustness.
Or, and this is typically the case for businesses that already offer a service, they build one themselves. Companies that offer services already have some form of account management built-in, so for them, it is easy to just add a custom forum software on top of it. For example, Apple Discussions, the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), Stack Overflow, and similar.
Today, most old forums run phpBB, and likely will until the end of time. Most newer forums by small-scale businesses (including those of CodeMirror or Nextcloud that I regularly frequent) have opted for Discourse. It does have visual appeal, but is more locked down than one might expect from Open Source software.
And then, there are tiny competitors with almost no market share. Two of them that I have tried in the past are Vanilla and Flarum. Both try to combine the visual appeal of Discourse with the robust PHP-backend of phpBB. But underneath, any forum still runs on the same cogs and wheels of the original phpBB from 2000-something.
Should Forums Make a Return?
All that leaves us with a final question: Should forums return to the forefront of the internet again? And if so, can they?
A few months ago, I stumbled upon a blog post that has inspired my thinking on forums in the past weeks, and this article in particular. “Discord, or the Death of Lore,” argues that the replacement of forums by Discord has started to kill off lore. Lore, or the phenomenon of strangers collectively writing stories on forums is another big part of the existence of forums. Here, I am mostly concerned with technical support, because I believe that this is more relevant to the average user.
But the author has a point. His solution is the “Death of Discord,” but I think that this is too harsh. True, for many Discord serves as a very simple replacement for facilitating technical support. But even with a forum, a Discord server can come in handy for some real-time help. It’s just not sustainable for long-term information retrieval. I think both are necessary, as they fulfill different roles.
In the end, if you maintain a software application, it depends on the circumstances what mixture of channels for communication you need. Some user-bases are mostly on Reddit; some on Bluesky; some on Instagram. But I believe forums should always be a bigger factor in the equation, because regardless of user base, a forum has benefits for everyone:
- For new users, it offers a complement to some program’s documentation that doesn’t focus on describing features, but solving the many tiny issues that arise as new users try to get the most out of it. It does so without the need for any account, and thus has the lowest threshold for participation.
- For developers, a forum reduces the friction in the long run. Yes, it needs to be maintained, but one usually has moderators to help out, and people will less frequently ask the same old questions over and over on your Discord server. It does free valuable time to focus on improving the program, rather than explaining the third user today that there was a bug in the new version, and they just need to update a second time.
- And for the community, it offers a space to reflect on the program, and feel at home. Something I found after discontinuing my forum for Zettlr and switching to GitHub Discussions and Discord was that the off-topic discussions died down. Indeed, everything died down. There was no rambling about some quirks the app has had for years, no sharing of anecdotes as to what often helps get the app to work again. In a sense, what got lost, was maybe indeed the lore.
These are the reasons I decided to revive the old Zettlr forum. Despite the competition from “cooler” technologies. Despite the lack of solutions for setting up a forum. Despite the prevalence of Discord tech-support servers. Because what the last three years of not having a forum has taught me in the context of my own app is that nothing can replace a forum. And despite all the work that a forum does require from time to time — the responsibility, the additional piece of software to keep updated — despite all of this, a forum is irreplaceable.
The forum was never dead. We just collectively decided to forget it. But it has been lurking ever since, waiting for our return. Long live the forum!
1 An interesting fact: Even though I have heard the dial-up sound of a 56K modem many times as a child, I couldn’t tell you how it sounded. The memory of this sound has been drowned by decades of listening to that one, single recording of a modem dialing up, way too clean, and somehow “fake.”
2 During my research for this article, I stumbled upon a fascinating side effect of this. To ensure compliance, Discourse forums come with a template for a Terms of Service section that administrators are supposed to adapt to their forum. However, in some ToS, I noticed something weird. They contained references to a company called “My Unconfigured Forum.” After some searching, I realized that these were ToS where the forum administrator never replaced the variables with proper values. How prevalent is this? Well, have a look for yourself!