/g/ — If you could design the perfect forum/BBS what would it be l

4chan but without captchas, cookie tracking, or draconian posting limits

>>109025780
But how would you moderate it?

>>109025756 (OP)
Do you mean the software that would run the forum or the community itself? Or maybe both?

>>109025792
Both, you cannot separate them
>https://web.archive.org/web/20050509012242/http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

>>109025756 (OP)
Honestly anon talk back in the day was pretty good just insufferable admin.
Minichan cloned it later.

>>109025789
IP ban and filters
This is how it was during moot's times

>>109025756 (OP)
it would be tree-structured for maximum focus.

>>109025811
But what if someone rolled thousands of US residential IPs and started spamming the board, it's no longer 2003. And if we suppose that you block 'word' can't someone just write w0rd, wrd w-rd drw or use some emoji for it? You can't win this battle desu.

>>109025819
Yes, but also allow a flat view like we have with 4chanx*

>>109025837
>But what if someone rolled thousands of US residential IPs and started spamming the board,
Isn't this kind of already happening with the corporation shills in every thread?
> it's no longer 2003
in 2003 it was very easy to evade bans by changing IP. Now you get cucked by a gorillion layers of Cloudflare and whatnot that thinks you're sus. Also my previous ISP made changing IP impossible. I can only do it from a mobile network that already assigns multiple customers to the same IP.
>And if we suppose that you block 'word' can't someone just write w0rd, wrd w-rd drw or use some emoji for it?
Yes and if so inclined, someone can buy a 4chan pass and spam with that. Speaking of 4chan passes, I suppose that's one reason 4chan can't go back to being good. But some other imageboard could.

File: sample_9f9c419b08a264d0b8f3f80a1d1d16d7.jpg (1.17 MB, 850x992)

>>109025797
If we're strictly talking about forums/BBS, I honestly think the existing software like Discourse/phpBB/SimpleMachines are already enough. I personally prefer imageboards, so lynxchan/jschan are also good enough for me, I really can't think of a way to improve them.

If we're talking general social/community software, I'd be more interested in something like what Matrix and Discord do. I think having the option of free-form instant messaging chat, structred forum discussion, VoIP and screensharing all in the same place to be extremely convenient, and it is something I use with my friends regularly. I also like what moriyashrine.org does by having both forums and a chat at the homescreen of the forums. If I were to make my own ideal forum, it would combine all those features of Matrix/Discord and MoriyaShrine, plus some kind of Wiki for guides and frequent questions. Maybe even a gallery/booru of sorts. And I'd like to introduce a way for users to create their own webpages as well. Is it overkill to have everything and the kitchen sink? Yeah, maybe. But I think a lot of websites manage to combine these features really well, and end up birthing some pretty interesting communities in the process.

All that being said, after spending years on all sorts of online communities - be them instant chat rooms, forums, discord servers, imageboards, IRCs, and so on - I'd say the single most important thing for an online community is good moderation. Encouraging good contributions while disencouraging bad ones. I've seen all sorts of communities organize and build really cool shit with the most basic of tools, because they had people who cared. The forum/bbs/other software will somewhat shape how people interact with the community, but fostering a group that contributes cool shit is the single most important thing for an online community. More so than whatever software they run.

>>109025900
>Speaking of 4chan passes, I suppose that's one reason 4chan can't go back to being good. But some other imageboard could.
NTA, but could you elaborate on that? What's so bad about passes that it prevents 4chan from being good?

>>109025789
Squads of hitmen.

>lust provoking image
>irrelevant time-wasting question

>>109026594
ImageBOARDs are BBSs and a type of forum.
>If we're talking general social/community software [...]
Interesting, but that is too much for a mere forum, what you're describing should be a new exchange protocol, while other things like webpages have their own protocols like HTTP and Gemini. And the identity can be preserved and traced through an ownership of a domain name. You're trying to build an internet on top of the internet, but your suggestions are understandable.
>[...] I'd say the single most important thing for an online community is good moderation [...]
This.

Thank you for your contribution.

>>109026600
It allows unpunished breaking of the rules by the privilege of the cheap pass.

It would work with HTML only, without Javascript.

>>109027266
Don't they explicitly say that your pass will be disabled with no refunds if you break the rules?

>>109025837
In XenForo, there's a feature to prevent dedicated shitters, called 'discouraged users'

Users in that group aren't banned, their experience is simply altered to nudge them out of the site. For instance pages will sometime fail to load, loading speed will be slower, some of their posts will not appear to all users, they'll receive fake spammy private messages etc.

The developers knew that you couldn't deter dedicated shitters through conventional techniques. So they had to get inventive

>>109028928
Yes
https://4chan.org/pass#banned
>What happens if I am banned?
>Your Pass will be permanently suspended for posting spam messages, advertising of any kind, or posting content that violates United States law. Regular bans and auto-bans will not revoke your Pass, however you may not use your Pass while banned. Only senior moderators may revoke Passes for the aforementioned violations, and must do so manually. No refund is provided for suspended Passes, nor will time be credited in the event you are not able to use your Pass due to a ban or for any other reason.

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>>109027252
Yeah, you're right. I'm adding way too much unrelated stuff at once. Wikis and websites could be hosted independetly from the main forum and simply be linked to it. It's not uncommon for a community to host a plethora of different things and just link them together, like a forum + discord + minecraft server. Or just use the built-in functionality of the forum to host certain things. A wiki may not be necessary if you make a dedicated subforum with just tutorial articles and FAQs, for example. I've seen discord servers do exactly this, as well.

If I had to add something I haven't seen before in a forum, is that I'd like a forum software that offer the option to post anonymously, either by marking individual posts to be anonymous, or having entire subforums/threads be forcebly anonymous. The posts would still be linked to your account, but only the moderators could see who made what post. This way you could still easily ban low quality users, while preserving the focus on the post itself rather than the poster's reputation, but you still have the option to post under your username when you desire to attatch your identity to your posts. I think this would combine some of the best features of traditional forums and imageboards.

Besides that, I can't think of much else for an ideal forum. I'm the kind of person who will simply adapt to the strengths and limitations of whatever forum/chat room I'm using, and rarely find myself thinking "man, this place is nice, but I really wish it had X feature so it would be perfect."

If I had to choose one kind of software for a community, I'd probably pick Matrix/Discord as I think they offer a lot of closely related things that make it convenient to have all in one place. And I would make the server be readable and indexable by search engines even if you don't have an account, since a lot of info nowdays is only shared on discord servers, making it harder to find if you don't have an account on them.

>>109029055
(cont.)
I think Matrix allows you to have a server and its rooms be visible without an account, but it's been a while since I've hosted a Matrix instance, so I can't say for sure. I don't know if Discord offers this option as well. But those are the only things I can think of right now that I'd like to see: a forum with optional anonymous posts/threads/subforums and an option to make Matrix/Discord servers readable without an account to help with finding information and deciding wether or not you want to join them in the first place.

>>109025819
Do you find a tree-view to be better? Maybe I'm just biased/been using it differently for a long time, but I prefer the flat model better, at least compared to how reddit does its tree-view.

>>109025857
Maybe a toggle would be the best, yeah.

>>109028790
Why limit yourself to HTML only? I understand JS can be bad when it is bloated and/or used for tracking, but is it a problem when it merely adds new functionality that isn't possible or is hard to implement in pure HTML and CSS?

>>109029098
a tree view is always better because you can collapse the whole branch that went offtopic or uninteresting.

>>109028941
Damn, this is the first time I've heard of that. Honestly, sounds like a good option to discourage bad users. I wonder how effective it is, I'd like to hear from forum mods who have used this feature.

>>109028945
Then I don't see how passes allow for unpunished breaking of the rules.

>>109029116
That's a good point, I hadn't thought of that. Maybe I'll try a tree view with 4chanx sometimes to see what it is like.

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>>109025811
You naïve retarded child. I run an anonymous chat site in the style of 4chan and it just takes one glowy bad actor to ruin your day. They can get new IPs in seconds and spam CP. It's not 2005 anymore.

I have gone from making everything work without JS to making it need some JS, this kills bots and the only people who cry about it are pedophiles.

>>109025819
>tree-structured
Faggot opinion

>>109025756 (OP)
Depends on TA. For most people I would not design anything, as they're boring and retarded. They want someone to get them hook and exploited, to consume slop mixed with propaganda and aids.
I do not want to participate in that.
To create a community of creative highly intelligent people it takes something else entirely, software is irrelevant here, it is not early 2000s anymore.

File: screencapture-umigalaxy-explore-2026-06-11-09_43_03.png (3.59 MB, 1920x2711)

I'm already building my own, people can post without accounts and if they decide to make an account, they can still post as anons if they want to https://umigalaxy.com/explore

>>109029165
have you thought about a 2-tier moderation system?
posts with sensitive data (links, images, videos) need to get approved. and if they don't want to wait for approval, then they can create an account and earn trust

>>109029055
>>109029071
The anonymous idea is quite good, it keeps you tied to an account so you can somehow moderate and make a karma system that rewards good contribution and punishes bad contribution, but still allows you sometimes to be pseudo-anonymous. But what about just anonymous posting like we have here, would it be allowed or it attracts a lot of shitposting and makes it harder to moderate, because imagine that you said something a mod doesn't like can't he just reveal you identity, or ban you account? The appeal of anonymous posting is that your posts aren't tied to an identity, but rather your posts represent themselves. Maybe allow accounts and anonymous posting?

>>109025756 (OP)
4chan with standards-compliant Commonmark (<p> instead of <br/>)

>>109026800
Asa sexo

>>109028790
>>109029112
If you allow JS on a site, and you use any common browser, that site can literally do whatever it wants on your machine only bordered by the engine and webAPIs, today they can even run wasm and mine crypto if they want, and most browser exploits start with JS. And let not talk about the circus of JS supply chain attacks. It's better to have the forum without JS but offer some kind of userscript that the user can control.
>https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/disable-javascript-org/
>https://disable-javascript.org/

>>109029190
>To create a community of creative highly intelligent people it takes something else entirely, software is irrelevant here, it is not early 2000s anymore.
Sure, but what if you have that kind of community, how the software would be like?

>>109025756 (OP)
Face posting leads to an immediate permanent ban, no appeals.
Filter phone fags based on browser capabilities.
Strictly enforce quarantine between different topics.
No politics, see point one for violators.
>but muh software
No one gives a shit, forum software hasn't meaningfully improved since the late 90s.

>>109029190
>>109031200
And how would you
>create a community of creative highly intelligent people

>>109031224
>No politics, see point one for violators.
This is good.
>>but muh software
>No one gives a shit, forum software hasn't meaningfully improved since the late 90s.
Then what should be improved? That's my question, if I made it about sociology then it wouldn't be a /g/ thread.

>>109025789
>How to moderate
Nta, however simply firewall all of asia. That includes canada, they fuck dogs and eat them as well over there

>>109031287
The problem are the people you can't theory or intellectualize your way out of that. I was there in the 90s and 2000s. I was the leader of countless forums, game servers, voice servers, and much more you wouldn't believe if I told you about it. The problem are the fucking people. The few remaining are too scattered and know better than to try again and the newcomers are so fried by their choosing of algorithms over raging against the dying of the light.
You can rewrite teamspeak a billion times, you can setup a billion minecraft city build servers, the people won't come back and neither will the culture because both have fully and irrecoverably died out. The short lived outrage at discord face ID confirmed the truth I've learned long ago yet again. People will complain endlessly but when you tell them to host their own servers and use something else they will come up with endless excuses.
The masses say they want the old internet back, the truth is they don't and that very much includes the lost souls, may god unironically have mercy on them and I say that as a fucking atheist, that are cargo culting the aesthetics of the era while fully missing that the tech and aesthetic didn't fucking matter, the people did.

>>109031309
firewalling some IPs wouldn't solve your problems, because even supposing that all the world's problem are from ze turdvorld then they can just use a residential proxy. It's better to encourage high quality posting and discourage shitposting, so users need to adapt to the environment, and maybe ban some IPs that are mainly harmful like India's and Israel depending on your community.

>>109031351
>India and Israel
All non-western nations have the potential to be India, Israel, China, vietmam, Canada and whomever else is a fucking plague.
It was stated best when it was suggested that giving asia access to the Internet gave them access to our Town square.
Nothing good comes out of that side of the planet and it never did.
We can start there and then talk about whatever solutions you have. Not all of them would even know about residential proxies etc.

>>109029112
I don't mean it couldn't have Javascript, just that it should also work without it because it gives more power to the user to choose, and the perfect forum/BBS to me doesn't have any features that strictly need JavaScript so if it broke when Javascript was disabled it would be a flaw.

>>109031310
Most of people are retards, in any place or time, but if you setup a cultural high bar, while attracting good people and repelling bad ones, you can have a decent community. It's not about the software or rules, but the cultural atmosphere people feel, because if you think about it, modern people and the way they act isn't from a choice they made, but an adaptation of modern society, the same people of today if they were born in the middle ages, they would act as a how people acted at the time. If you treat them as conscious and intelligent, then you'd have a messy farm, but if you hold the goad and train the dogs, the heard will be good. Even if people are individually intelligent, as a group they're like a herd.
>https://web.archive.org/web/20050509012242/http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

>>109031240
that's sociology again, and it's already solved
just start a cult

>>109031532
Its one of the few things I haven't tried but its success rate can't be worse.

>>109025756 (OP)
I would start by redesigning TCP

>>109025756 (OP)
It would exist 20 years ago.

>>109032443
The last year before things irreversibly went to shit.

>>109025756 (OP)
Israeli and Indian IPs blocked by default (chink and Ruskie IPs will follow if there is too much shilling) , you are forced to put you gender and a picture of your genitals on the registratiom profile. No flag posting, only one subforum with that shit (like /pol/).

I guess that's all.

>>109032443
>>109032455
I'm a zoomer, so I never personally experienced the golden age of the internet, but I have some knowledge of it through reading the archived data. It seems to be that this time is like a dark age of the internet, and it might never be as good as it was, because it's mainly a problem of the people of today, not just in the cyberspace, but all of the world is suffering from a lack of humanity, mainly because of all the nonsense they were programmed to (mkultra et al) and it seems that we will never get that back unless we cut all of the nonsense from our lives and return to be more human, because every other problem that you might relate to the fall of the internet and society in general is a mere symptom to the latter illness, because in a non homogeneous environment to humans they will always feel annoyed and miserable to the degree of their humanity.

But how was it really at that time at the golden age of the internet? Maybe our or some other generation can have a net renaissance based on the olden texts. Today many zoomers romanticize that era, and try to loosely replicate it, maybe something good will happen.

>>109032623
Sorry to say that if you didn't live it no amount of reading what little was archived will ever give you a real impression of what it was like. It's like a blind person reading about colours in a braille book. You might get the concept but not the meaning. I genuinely don't mean to put you down but the entire era was so vastly different from today that I still can not explain it to someone that hasn't experienced it decades later. But yeah you are right above all else its the people that changed.