[MalPearce]

Over the last 20 years a whole bunch of forums like this one have closed, Webcrossing based ones. I was on an American one way back in the 90s, can’t even remember which big media/news company ran it... Might’ve been CNN.

Two more that the old timers here might’ve heard of are the Guardian Unlimited Talk boards (think FR for British hippies) and the BBC talkboards.

Closed comment options are far more common partly because it’s easier to manage the moderation. You try setting up a community talkboard like this one, without using legacy or custom code.

The scalable replacements for old school talkboard forums are so few and far between that one enterprising chap started to set up a replacement for Guardian Talk after its overnight unannounced mothballing, and within four days he had almost completely replicated the Webcrossing look and feel.

No reason why John couldn’t replicate all the functionality of this site, in a completely new codebase, in a couple of weeks, if he needed to.

The real challenge is in functionality. The code would be more attractive if it supported format restrictions (if it were me I’d block posting in raw html - don’t know if it’s vulnerable to malicious code, or if l spam detection, link validation etc. can be built-in).

Then there’s

Tinyurl handling
Spell checking
Mobile friendly / mobile app
A “rich text” edit box
”at” references for reply tagging

Freepers might not want these features, but new talkboards might.

No ads,

[dayglored]

I'll leave the future of FR to JimRob and JohnRob. It has developed and survived and thrived for 20+ years in their capable hands.

That said, my opinion is:

• Advertising would ruin it. FR is private and beholden to no third parties.
• Simplicity rules. The more "featureful" it gets, the more trouble it becomes and the more manpower/time required to support it.
• Small is beautiful. FR is, IMO, "right-sized" at present. I really don't think it could, say, triple in size, without having to change substantially.
• Moderation is presently pretty light-handed. Some would argue that it's already too heavy-handed, but just you wait until it gets more attention from our elected overlords.
• Growth for the sake of growth is a rather "Progressive" value. FR is a "Conservative" site, and "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a conservative value.

Again, the above are just my opinion. Been here over 15 years now. I like it. I'd hate to have to leave because it morphed into something not as good.

[Kevmo]

I’m not a software dude, so about half of what you said
went over my head.

But I have noticed on other cheap sites that there are plenty of dropdown menu options for using html coding. That would be one of the features I would add to a licensed FR platform, if I could. Would if I could.....