A more congenial place

Greg Hewgill from 222.154.165.47 at Fri, 26 May 2006 08:00:10 +0000:
Thank you!

Steve from 165.154.6.86 at Fri, 26 May 2006 20:47:26 +0000:
AMEN! All great reasons why not to use web forums. (Aka correctly as Web BBSes, but the language convention dictates to call it what people routinely call it.) And why I hate phpBB in particular. Ctrl-A's old blue and yellow forum was the least offensive version I had used. If ctrl-a has to have a web forum, is that one possible? Or is it gone forever?

Axel from 65.94.181.126 at Fri, 26 May 2006 20:51:08 +0000:
The earliest OED citation with "forums" as the plural of "forum" is dated 1647. In fact I don't see any with "fora". Old words do tend to become naturalized, eventually--and they also pick up new meanings.

Steve from 165.154.6.86 at Fri, 26 May 2006 21:13:33 +0000:
Also three other web BBS problems you left unmentioned:

1) Lost or forgotten account info- If you have lots of web BBSes you use, your choices are: a) Remember lots of unique logins & passwords, b) Keep the logins all the same so you only have to remember one, c) Let your computer remember for you.
Problems with each: a) Very hard to do, especially if you give unique email addresses to each one to protect yourself from spam. (Forum may be configured to publicly show your address, or be admin'ed by a spamming sysop). b) Not secure from forum to forum especially if you use different forums for the same interests. If someone is able to figure out your password for one, they can likely figure out what other forums you frequent. c) Can't log in on a remote computer to use a web forum.
So choose a) b) or c) and be inconvenienced or screwed by using a Web BBS.

2) Sysops deleting your account- Perhaps you just wanted to read messages and had to set up an account. Since you didn't post "me too" now and then keeping your account active, you have to make a new account. Or my personal favorite rationale Ctrl-A's sysop used on my account, "Some accounts had names that appeared as though they may have been set up by a spammer. They didn't use them to spam, and instead posted relevant info, but I banned that account and others just to be sure." So "temp" becomes "temptemp", "temptemp" becomes "temptemptemp" etc... great job sysop.

3) Or the best reason why Web BBSes suck: You are posting a lengthy post in the "handy box" and you submit it... oh wait you took to long to write it! Session expired! Too bad you lost EVERYTHING you just wrote. You should have written it in your own stable text editor (complete with built in spell checker that the web bbs lacked) and cut and paste it into the "handy box"... YOU SILLY N00B!

owen from 74.120.31.7 at Sat, 13 Jan 2007 02:57:48 +0000:
Oh, piss whine and moan.

What do you want, one giant company running all the boards so that they all use a common logic? Maybe the government should run all fora.

If they all suck so much, write a better one and earn yrself 1000milliondollars. Biiotch.

Shoofle from 68.57.188.167 at Mon, 22 Jan 2007 02:54:17 +0000:
Really, a lot of what you say I see as acceptable (desirable?) trade-offs for ease of use. Of course it's a web-based interface - that's the whole POINT of a web-based BBS. The sticky system allows others to make modifications, and if this isn't wanted, well, the post can be protected. Spam is a problem, but remedied at least partially by CAPTCHA's. I don't understand what you object to about the sysop problem - would you have them manually flipping the bits on the server's hard drive?
One of the advantages of having a web-based interface is that we can have competition for the base of the system. This allows you to, as owen said (though I disapprove of his wording) write your own without everyone needing to get the same new interface - instead, everyone has a standards-compliant browser, which is effectively what you would need to write.

Matthew Skala from 216.59.230.140 at Mon, 22 Jan 2007 03:32:08 +0000:
Most of the objections I have to Web BBSes are *not* caused by having a Web interface. They could be fixed while still having a Web interface.

For instance, there is nothing about the Web that forces Web BBSes to use a completely broken threading model - and yet, they do. There's nothing about the Web that forces them to actively prevent users from using email to talk to each other - on the contrary, it would be much easier to have an "email" button on each posting with a mailto: URL instead of having to build an entire email system into the software. There's nothing about the Web that prevents the software from enforcing reasonable limits on user behaviour (such as "no large images in your signature"). These problems aren't caused by being on the Web; they are caused by failing to learn the lessons of the pre-Web history of electronic discussion fora.

I don't understand what you mean by "the sysop problem". One of the points I made that might be relevant is that the software gives sysops the wrong tools for managing discussions and rule-enforcement, so that the things they should be able to do, they can't do, and they're forced to use poorly-fitting substitutes like thread locking.

There are almost no problems to which CAPTCHAs are the right solution.

Matthew Skala from 216.59.230.140 at Mon, 22 Jan 2007 03:43:33 +0000:
Oh, and as for "standardized interfaces" - dialup BBSes and Usenet newsgroups had standardized interfaces too, in fact, much more so than current Web BBSes. They both were so well-standardized that people could, and routinely did, use smart clients of their own choice. Users were NOT forced to use any particular smart client - they all worked with all the systems - and they were NOT forced to use a smart client at all.

Now that choice has been taken away in the name of "standardization", and we don't even have the benefits of "standardization" because actually, the ability to use smart clients *was* the visible aspect of standardization. Current Web BBSes can be accessed with a "standard Web browser", but with nothing else, because they don't expose any machine-readable interfaces. The entire system is in effect a CAPTCHA preventing users from doing anything smart, like aggregating traffic from multiple systems into one page.

If there were really a standard interface, I could read all the new postings on a dozen systems in one session without manually logging into each of them separately. I was able to do that on dialup BBSes 15 years ago. By now it ought to be a trivial, core function of the software, so obviously an essential part of BBS software that it wouldn't even be mentioned as a feature; but instead it has become an absurd pipe dream. We've been improving backwards.

Steve from 165.154.153.189 at Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:23:58 +0000:
I found a new "feature" of suckiness in a web bbs that was so bad I had to share it. A programmer used the private mail function of a web bbs as his contact information. (Ok fine, he doesn't want his email spammed.) But the web bbs had me go through an extra difficult registration system (took me 20min of actively fighting with it to register) and then when I finally got to the point where I could send a private mail (and after writing it) it told me that I had to post 20 'regular' posts before I'd be allowed to private message someone. So after an hour of *just trying to write an email*... I gave up in disgust.

Nick T from 192.190.75.16 at Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:34:35 +0000:
So you've described a lot of technical problems with Web BBS's, and in turn, there have been a lot of technical replies. From a communicational/social perspective, is there anything wrong with Web BBS's?

Matt from 69.63.63.131 at Thu, 12 Jul 2007 02:42:27 +0000:
I think some of the technical problems *create* corresponding social problems - such as the lack of effective rule-enforcement tools for sysops - but I think those problems are specific to Web BBSes as we currently know them, not general to all imaginable Web BBSes. I think Web BBSes properly implemented would be okay.