Not sure my opinion counts as it's been almost 2 years since I seriously looked into forum admin, and I just peek in here from time to time because I like the cozier feel of old-school forums compared to modern social media.

Anyway, I don't see the harm in allowing users to create their own communities assuming the feature is off by default. My only issue, and I'm not sure it's even an issue, is that this, along with NodeBB's use of ActivityPub, pushes NodeBB into the niche of other Threadiverse platforms like Lemmy and Piefed. The only difference is the terms used and default presentation. Don't get me wrong the defaults have a HUGE impact on community culture. As I've pointed out elsewhere something as simple as the default sorting order of posts effects how people browse, post, and organize the content they present. Lemmy is, by default, a stream of new content, whereas forums are, by default, a place for long-lasting discussions.

Allowing user-created subforums would, I suspect, have a similarly huge effect on how NodeBB communities are run by mods and admins and how they feel to users.

Since you mention game guides, I'll say that a traditional forum is a far better fit than Discord. The problem is convincing everyone else of that fact. Every open source project or software package seems to use Discord for its help "forums" now, but Discord wasn't designed for cumulative, searchable, long-term discussions.

To give a personal anecdote, I was trying to follow BlenderGuru's donut tutorial, and was stuck on something or other. Of course, BlenderGuru has a Discord, and there's a channel specifically for questions about his donut tutorial. I ask my question, and it flies off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.

Since you don't specify what game, I'm assuming you're looking to start a general gaming forum. That's probably a smarter bet than dedicating a forum to a single game, and so a much smaller pool of potential forum members. Most people may need some convincing to join a traditional forum after years of Reddit, Discord, and Facebook. You could perhaps lean into the traditional forum angle, trying to attract people nostalgic for slower, more long lasting, and personal style of communication offered by forums.

If you have the admin skills and don't expect a lot of concurrent users, a VPS is cheap, so the risk is low. I'd say go for it anyway.

I'm not sure what "switch-appropriate" means in this context.

Also not sure if you mean forums running nodeBB specifically or just any forum. I'm on a few, mainly for worldbuilding and constructed languages. The CBB forum and The ZBB. There's a lot of overlap in user base between the two, though I prefer the former. Both run phpBB. There's also Anthologica which is running custom software with features that cater to the conlanging community. I attempted to make a nodeBB instance for these topics, which is why I have an account here. But I decided that the hobby was too niche to risk spreading it thinner.

I hang out on some video game forums too. The Minecraft Forum is a shadow of what it used to be when the game was in beta. I was just on The Terraria forums yesterday. I apparently don't have an account there but I can swear I posted there back in 2012.

Upvote for the interrobang.

I have no answer but want to echo my desire for this feature. I'd like an easy way to archive threads offline.

> @julian said: > > @dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone good god did you reply to an 11 year old post? 😝

Thread necromancy is why forums are awesome! I've posted about this elsewhere, but with forums, you can have a single thread go on for years as long as people keep posting. On aggregator-type sites like Reddit that prioritize new content over old but still relevant content, you have to make new posts about the same topic once the old post drops off the first page because nobody's going to go looking for it. I have a thread on a phpBB forum that's been going for years, but I had to abandon an identical thread on Lemmy once it dropped off the first page.

> @Kowlin said: > > it encourages someone to just get something out there fast for upvotes. Not thinking too much about the content they share

I think that applies mostly to sites where total votes are tracked per user like Reddit's karma system, but yes I agree. Lemmy for example doesn't track upvotes per user, only per post and comment, so there's less incentive to karma farm. It does encourage echo chambers as you suggest, where dissenting opinions are buried. The default sorting algorithm on sites like Reddit and its clones counts votes as well as post age (another gripe of mine).

I also think it makes for less meaningful interactions. I've stated this elsewhere on here. Instead of saying "I liked this because..." or "I disagree because..." you just click a button to change a number.

I think voting does have merit for Q&A or how-to topics, where you can use it to quickly see what's good advice vs bad when you may not be familiar with the topic.

CDNs like Cloudflare seem to mitigate things to some degree. I self host a little instance of Mediawiki. Before putting it behind Cloudflare I was getting a firehose of requests, now it's just Cloudflare's caching thingy doing it's thing.

I'm not sure it does anything about AI crawlers other than taking the load off the end server and on to the CDN, so it's probably not stopping the clankers from stealing your data.

Using Cloudflare has its own host of issues though, namely concentrating a bunch of stuff behind a single point of failure as was seen a few weeks ago.

@omega I'll have to look into that.