New forum? Really?

Some context first - I was a forum moderator of a few different forums back in the 90's. As time passed I began to run my own forums for the hobby in which I most engaged. As my first self-employed job was in IT and I was pretty good with coding it just made sense. Then HTML5, and 'web 2.0' started to drop. Search engines got better, so did crawlers and the like. Sadly, so too came the age of massive forum spam and bots designed effectively to DDoS forums.

While I certainly understand the frustrations with the limitations of this forum platform - developing both a secure forum, and a feature packed forum is not the easiest of tasks. For a charity with a limited budget to be able to offer a forum at all is, in my eyes, an impressive feat. 

I don't want to come across as saying that we should just be grateful for the forum without any criticisms at all. I would just like to highlight that forums are extremely susceptible to abuse and bots. So for me, when I understand the underlying challenges and limitations of forum platforms anything that bothers me is likely to be accepted as a limitation of forums in general when run by charities and small companies.  

Perhaps this forum doesn’t work on the same principle as social media sites such as Twitter for example, but didn’t the person who started Twitter attempt to do something similar with Threads? Didn’t Threads have problems with the formatting that couldn’t be rectified easily, even by experts with money? Perhaps I am completely deluded and please tell me if I am. I know nothing of forum design but just wondered if this is the same sort of thing.

I mean, in the early days yes. Facebook was built on php (a programming language) which was the basis for most forums. Twitter was originally designed to work in a similar way to SMS (Text) messaging. That is, according to legend, the reason for the character limits. I've never seen confirmation of this though.

Functionally, if we break it down to its simplest they're all theoretically the same. You've got users who want to post content and interact with other users. It's a bit like asking three engineers to design a bridge. Each engineer is probably going to have similar solutions, but they might all get different results because they take a different approach. Coders are pretty similar in that regard. It's why, way back when, you were taught to both annotate and print hard copies of your code - so that if another coder came in, or you were collaborating it was actually possible to see and understand someone's approach to a problem. [God I feel old...can you even imagine printing off code these days!]

I never progressed beyond dabbling in BASIC, got left behind and eventually switched to a MAC. I might have continued if I’d known what I was doing ‍

I never progressed beyond dabbling in BASIC, got left behind and eventually switched to a MAC. I might have continued if I’d known what I was doing ‍