Originally posted by nym
Old forums were definitely a product of their age. I suppose I've hit all of them, though I've only stood up IPB 1.3, 4.something and a couple versions of acmlmboard. I hated vBulletin back in the day but that image sure brings me back. What about SimpleMachines? Whoa, they just released a new version! I would have assumed that project was long dead.
i never really liked SimpleMachines ;;
the layout of their forums always seemed super messy to me and not that spatially efficient
still, it's something fun to play around with
i also hate vBulletin but i also feel some weird nostalgia and curiosity about it
it's weird. vBulletin's default smiley set and its aesthetic sort of promulgated everywhere through Something Awful, so it feels foundational to a decent chunk of internet culture
i also, for some dumb reason, really like the purple-and-yellow sort of color scheme. it doesn't feel like much that exists these days, and in the Admin CP especially it has some weird level of warmth to it aesthetically. of course, you could say that anything with color at all doesn't feel like much that exists these days
IPB was actually good, though, before they started Social Media-izing their forums to stay Relevant. ironically digging themselves further into the ditch of their irrelevance...
they could have just accepted that forums were what they were and that it was fine for them to lose a little activity. but by adding likes and profile comments and all this other engagement/click-driving garbage, they made forums bloated and tacky and literally got rid of what was so appealing about them as a contrast to social media in the first place.
...
god, Google having a click-based advertising model ruined the internet.
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