Forums — The Internet's Town Halls

If you were using the Internet in the late 1990s or early 2000s, there was a very good chance that you belonged to a forum. It might have been a computer forum, a car forum, a gaming community, somewhere dedicated to a particular hobby, or simply a website where a group of people had gathered because they happened to share an interest.

Forums became one of the defining features of the early Web because they gave people somewhere to talk. That sounds rather obvious now, but at the time it was a significant development. The earlier BBS and Usenet systems had already shown that computers could bring people together, but web forums made the whole idea considerably easier to access. All you needed was a web browser, an Internet connection and an interest in whatever the community happened to be discussing.

For a while, forums really were the Internet's town halls.

From BBSs and Usenet to the Web

The forum didn't appear from nowhere. BBSs had provided message boards for years, while Usenet had created huge distributed discussions through its newsgroups. The Web simply brought the idea into a much more familiar environment.

Early web-based message boards appeared during the mid-1990s, including WIT in 1994 and WWWBoard in 1995. The software was fairly basic, but the principle worked: visitors could read messages, post their own and return later to see the replies.

As the Web became more popular, dedicated forum software began to appear. UBB and vBulletin became popular commercial choices, while phpBB, which began in 2000, provided an open-source alternative. Suddenly, running a discussion community didn't require somebody to develop the entire system themselves. If you had some web hosting and enough enthusiasm, you could install the software and start building a community.

That helped produce an enormous number of independent forums.

There Was a Forum for Everything

During the forum era, the Internet was full of specialist communities. There were forums for computers, cars, photography, music, films, games, electronics, programming and practically every hobby you could think of.

Some were attached to established websites, while others were created by enthusiasts simply because they couldn't find anywhere else to discuss what interested them.

This was one of the things that made the Web interesting. You didn't necessarily go to one enormous website to find everything. You went looking for the people who shared your interests.

You might discover a forum with only a few hundred members, but if those members were knowledgeable and enthusiastic, it could be far more useful than a much larger general-purpose site.

The Community Was the Important Part

The forum software itself was really only the framework. The interesting bit was what happened once people started using it.

Regular members became familiar faces, even if you had never met any of them in real life. You knew who was particularly knowledgeable about a subject, who was always willing to help, who had a talent for making everybody laugh and, inevitably, who could turn almost any discussion into an argument.

People built reputations through what they contributed. If someone had spent years answering questions about Linux, vintage computers or a particular car, you knew that their advice was probably worth listening to.

That gave forums a different kind of social structure from the follower-based Internet that came later. Your reputation was largely earned through participation.

Threads Gave the Internet a Memory

Perhaps the most useful feature of forums was the way discussions were preserved.

Somebody could ask a question, receive several answers and eventually solve their problem, but the thread would remain on the forum. Six months later another person could find it through a search engine and discover that their problem had already been discussed.

This happened constantly, particularly on technical forums.

A person might have an obscure problem with an old computer, a piece of software or a car that was no longer particularly well supported. Finding an official answer could be almost impossible, but somebody somewhere had probably encountered the same problem and written about it.

The answer might be buried in a ten-year-old thread, but it was still there.

This turned forums into enormous, largely accidental knowledge bases. The people using the technology became the people documenting it, often without realising that what they were writing would still be useful years later.

Search Engines Benefited

Search engines made this particularly powerful because they could index forum discussions.

Before long, searching for an obscure error message or technical problem would often produce a forum thread containing exactly the information you needed. It might not have been particularly well written, and the person who provided the answer might have had a username like AmigaDave1978, but if it fixed the problem, none of that mattered.

There was also something useful about the fact that forum discussions often contained the mistakes as well as the final answer. Somebody would suggest a solution, another member would explain why it didn't work and eventually somebody would come up with the correct approach.

You were seeing people work through a problem rather than simply being presented with a polished answer.

Forums Developed Their Own Culture

Of course, once a forum had been around for a while, it developed rules and customs.

New members were usually expected to read the rules and, preferably, search before asking a question that had already been answered. This was entirely reasonable, although the way it was sometimes communicated left a little to be desired.

There was always somebody ready to tell a newcomer that their question had been answered "a hundred times already", followed by another member pointing out that being rude to newcomers wasn't particularly helpful.

Before long, the original question had disappeared beneath an argument about forum etiquette.

That was normal forum life.

Moderators had the job of keeping things under control, dealing with spam, moving threads and occasionally putting an end to arguments that had clearly gone nowhere. The best moderators were experienced members who understood the community, although there were certainly occasions when somebody was given moderator powers and immediately behaved as though they had been appointed dictator of a small European nation.

The Off-Topic Section

As forums grew older, another thing happened. People who had originally arrived because of a shared interest started becoming friends.

A computer forum might have begun with discussions about hardware and software, but eventually people wanted somewhere to discuss films, television, holidays, politics, jokes or whatever else was happening.

Hence the Off Topic section.

These areas could become just as important as the original subject because they were where the community itself developed. After several years, people weren't necessarily visiting because they needed information about a graphics card or a particular operating system. They were visiting because they wanted to see what the people they had been talking to for years were saying.

The subject had brought them together, but the community kept them there.

Forums Were Far From Perfect

It would be wrong to pretend that forums were some kind of golden age of polite Internet discussion.

They had trolls, spam, flame wars, cliques and arguments. Some communities were extremely welcoming, while others could be rather hostile to newcomers. Moderators could be helpful or completely unreasonable, and forum administrators could make decisions that caused considerable arguments among their own members.

The difference was largely one of scale.

If one forum became unpleasant, there were thousands of others. Communities could develop their own personalities and rules, and people could simply move elsewhere if they didn't like the way one was being run.

The Internet was fragmented, and in this particular case that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Then Came Social Media

The decline of traditional forums wasn't caused by one particular event. Social media simply offered a much easier way of doing many of the same things.

Facebook groups allowed people to create communities without installing forum software or maintaining a server. Reddit gathered huge numbers of subject-based communities together in one place, while Discord combined persistent community channels with real-time chat.

For users, the convenience was obvious. One account could give you access to friends, groups and communities without having to remember a collection of separate websites.

Independent forums had a difficult time competing with that.

The problem was that something else changed at the same time.

From Communities to Platforms

A traditional forum could be independently operated. Somebody could register a domain, rent some hosting, install phpBB or another package and create a community.

The administrator controlled the site and database, while the members created the content. The forum could be redesigned, modified or moved without asking permission from a huge technology company.

Modern social platforms work differently because the community exists inside the platform.

That is convenient, but it also means the platform ultimately controls the environment. Rules can change, interfaces can change, advertising can be introduced and algorithms can alter which discussions people actually see.

The community may have thousands of members, but it doesn't own the place where it meets.

The Timeline Changed Things

There was also a fundamental change in how information was presented.

Forums were organised around subjects. You went to a particular section and looked at the discussions that interested you.

Social media increasingly became organised around a constantly changing feed. Instead of deciding which discussion you wanted to read, the platform could decide what it thought you should see next.

That makes social media extremely convenient, but it also makes conversations more transient.

A useful forum thread could sit there for ten years waiting for somebody to find it. A useful comment in a social-media feed can disappear from view within hours.

The information hasn't necessarily gone anywhere. Finding it again can be another matter.

Reddit and the Survival of the Forum Idea

Interestingly, the forum itself never really disappeared. Reddit retained much of the traditional model while putting it inside a much larger platform.

Its communities have their own subjects, moderators, rules, posts and replies, and some discussions can become extremely long and detailed.

Stack Overflow took another part of the forum idea and concentrated on questions and answers, attempting to make useful information easier to find through voting and ranking.

Discord took the idea in a more immediate direction, combining persistent text channels with real-time conversation.

The terminology changed, the software changed and the business models changed, but the basic requirement remained the same: people still wanted somewhere to talk to other people who shared their interests.

What We Lost

What disappeared wasn't simply the forum website.

It was the huge collection of independently run communities that once made up so much of the Web.

You could find a forum run by a car enthusiast, another maintained by a group of Linux users and another belonging to a local club, all completely independent of one another. They could have their own rules, their own personalities and their own histories.

Many of those communities also created valuable archives without ever setting out to do so.

A discussion from 2003 could still be helping somebody twenty years later.

That is harder to achieve when conversations are designed to move rapidly through a feed.

Could Forums Come Back?

Technically, there is nothing stopping them.

Modern hosting is cheap, forum software is mature and running a small community is considerably easier than it was twenty years ago. The real challenge is getting people to join when enormous established platforms are already competing for their attention.

Perhaps, though, a forum doesn't need thousands or millions of members.

A few hundred people who genuinely care about a subject can produce an enormous amount of useful information, and a smaller community can have something that the biggest platforms often struggle to provide: people actually knowing who they are talking to.

That was always the real strength of forums.

They gave people somewhere to belong.

The Legacy of the Forum

Forums took the conversational ideas of BBSs and Usenet and brought them into the Web, making online communities accessible to almost anybody with a browser.

They became places to ask questions, share knowledge, argue about things that probably weren't worth arguing about, make friends and occasionally spend far more time than intended discussing something incredibly obscure.

Their influence is still everywhere. Reddit, Stack Exchange, Discord and social-media groups all contain elements of the old forum model.

The biggest difference is that the old Web was much more fragmented. There were thousands of independent communities rather than a relatively small number of enormous platforms, and that gave the Internet a character that is harder to find today.

You could have your own website, join a forum, use IRC, subscribe to a mailing list and perhaps even run a BBS, with each place offering something slightly different.

None of them had to be the whole Internet.

They were simply places on the Internet.

And perhaps that is the part of the forum era that is worth remembering. The technology was never particularly complicated; what mattered was that people could build a place around an interest, invite others in and let a community develop its own character.

For a while, the Internet wasn't one giant town.

It was made up of thousands of little ones.