Why did phpBB forums go out of fashion?

Combination of reddit swallowing everyone and every php webapp being a dumpster fire of vulnerabilities making them a constant source of maintenance headaches.

source: I ran & hosted zx6e.net, a niche but active motorcycle forum, for over a decade. Sunsetted the site for lack of user growth combined with becoming sick of operating php trash.

As a user, I switched to reddit. With subreddit it was so easy to move to a new forum and you'd get a single feed with new posts from all forums you were on. Signup barely qualified as sign up.

It's ranking algorithm was better than "newest activity", the collapsible trees made branching discussion tolerable, and the aging of posts kept those 2000 page long top posts with hundreds of branching discussions displayed linearly from happening.

I used to run a php board in the late 90s I think. It needed to be constantly watched and updated otherwise it was spammed and hacked horribly. I didn't really have the skills and time to keep on top of it. Having a reddit group would be way easier, but reddit is kind of annoying now. There is zero technical knowledge and minimal time to set up a Facebook group and almost all not for profit groups seem to use Facebook for this now in the UK at least. This is actually quite a good feature of Facebook IMHO.

I do know a few sites that run custom bulletin boards for my hobbies, but that requires a developer to be available much of the time to ensure uptime. 2 examples are:

https://www.ukriversguidebook.co.uk/ - which is originally based off phpbb I think

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/ - which I think is completely custom

I think the content on newer platforms (TikTok, Reddit, Twitter whatever) is presented in a more mentally stimulating way, so people just tend to gravitate towards those things. And yes, ads too probably.

That being said, any time forums come up in discussion there is so much nostalgia there. Messing around with forums software like vBulletin and stuff as a kid taught me a lot about the internet, ftp, php, hosting things, graphics design, etc.

I wonder if older people feel the same way about BBS?

I think in addition to already mentioned reasons, part of it was also that various forum software were generally late to the party in regards to responsive layouts and working well on mobile. even these days phpbb isn't great (though at least it does have a responsive layout by default)

Spam was a losing battle. I stopped running a bulletin board around the same time I stopped hosting a mail server.

People blame Reddit, but it's not Reddit alone and this is extremely evident if you could see it for the demographics where nor Reddit nor English-based sites are the norm.

The main problem is the network effect (which Reddit did right) and what at 2010-2012 there was a massive change in the demographics of the new users on the Net: more and more people started to interact with it through the phones only. phpBB-like forums never had usable UI for the phones (though they are still a magnitude lighter and usable than modern Reddit, lol) and had one main problem: discoverability.

To Average Joe (who thinks Internet is that 'F' picture on the phone) the process of discovery (Internet search) and registration (e-mail based, captcha ridden) is way too much.

Add all other shortcoming listed in the other comments (notably the need to spend money, time and brain power on just maintaining the forum itself) and it's pretty evident why most of the forums died.

NB I still frequent one forum, site OP moved it to XenForo from phpBB years ago and did numerous modifications and integrations both for the old and new versions, which isn't available on Reddit at all.

Another forum is still running ikonboard, but it's userbase is... I'd say "not Discord/Reddit-compatible", which is also partly answers to your question: it is viable for some small (on Internet scale of things) community to thrive on a 'classic' forum software... but only if Discord/Reddit doesn't provide way less friction and/or discoverability.

From my own impression and what other people here are saying, it seems to boil down to ease-of-use:

1) high admin costs of forums due to security issues and spam,

2) usability issues from clunky interfaces and separate accounts for each forum.

On Reddit/FB/etc., the admins don't have to take care of security, and users only need one login to access any community on the site. So yes, the demise of the forums is in some ways quite regrettable, but nonetheless understandable.

Because of Reddit.

I was a phpbb2 free forums provider back in 2006. Had a million visitors per month. But spam was a big problem and monetizing barely paid the server cost, which cost 120 eur per month. 1 server had about 2500 instances and load was always >1.0 . All my time went into maintaining the site. After a while I had the option either continue to waste my time with this or just close it down. I opted to close it and sell backups of the database for 25€ each. I got some hate, to which I responded with hate myself, ungrateful bunch! Some communities however managed to get started on my platform and migrated to hosting their own. I remember one community in particular, which was a goose farmer community from Finland. I helped them migrate to their own host and the member made a thank you thread, which was so heart warming :). And then there was a writers community from Poland. All in all it was very interesting to see all the different kinds of nieches and interests people were into. There was a FKK aka nudist forum, and I would get adsense warnings on a regular basis. So I exempt them from adsense ads but put some adultfriendfinder ads there.

Anyhow I've been writing a modern, real-time multi forum system for the last 4 years on and off, but idk if it's ever going to be ready. Forum software may not look it, but it actually quite complicated.

Forums went away and got replaced by the horrible reddit, which Google pushes in their results. Every damn exotic search has a reddit result in the top 3 results.

Facebook added to that, forums were the main info banks, then Facebook came and not only mostly destroyed forums but also classic, colorful websites. I hate to talk like that but what once was a wild, arguably pretty and free internet, Facebook turned into a white-blue dystopia. A walled garden where censorship was and is the norm, where you're identified and tracked, where you habe zero choice about the look of your profile/wall. Is it even called a wall anymore?

And what's worse Instagram is replacing Facebook. Communication by images only. How dumb is that?

Yes we need text culture back. But nowadays if I would be super smart and have the resources, I'd probably build a speech recognizing feature, where you can just record paragraphs because people don't like typing. With the option to also post that recorded passages of speech and read that text aloud. Which brings me to Adsense has this new experimental feature, reading content out aloud and monetizing that. 1+1=2?

That would actually make forums have a comeback. Because now you actually CAN monetize single posts.

P.s. those ~2500 instances were hosted on a single core amd64 with 2GB of RAM and RAID1 only.

Lack of global discoverability. On Reddit, if you have an interest and you search for some keyword related to that interest then you will likely find a sub related to it.

On transitional forums, you'd have to use Google. And your ability to find a community would be directly impacted by the owners skill at SEO unless you're constructing rather advanced queries.

There was also a poor UX compared to social media. Site owner doesn't pay the monthly hosting fee from their web host? Site is down. Can't really admin a MySQL DB? Site is frequently down when it grows past some point. Shitty web host? Site is slow (or down). Reddit solves this by being centrally managed.

Spam. The problems with an arms race is that you generally can’t have many winners.

Eternally Septembered. The threads got so big that it didnt look good anymore and the non-hierarchical comments became too messy. There is so much information that people switch to "recent-only" platforms like facbook reddit twitter etc.

There was not a lot of effort to make a middle ground -- but it is not clear what UX would be right for that. The UX is largely dictated by the scale of the community, e.g. FB treats all comments as dispensable, reddit keeps topics open for 30 days, stackoverflow cares about ranking etc. Also the predominance of mobile and app stores means that those forums became undiscoverable. Everything in the past 15 years have been tailored to make the big fish bigger.

Hosting costs, spam, upgrades, plugins, maintenance, customization, it’s a lot of work.

vogons runs on phpbb :)

eevblog, probably biggest english speaking electronics community runs on SMF

reddit is easier, and a lot of the people running them got older and got families, and younger people drifted towards all the various social media sites.

Php is notoriously insecure.

It also doesn’t scale well for the size of modern web communities.

People also changed the way that they want to interact, from text based BB’s to more media rich, action based social networks.