Side notes regarding some forums

• Link: https://www.unitedbsd.com/

This is a forum regarding the discussion of the various BSD operating systems. It seems to me that they are mostly interested in NetBSD. They are friendly and helpful, and plenty of names from other place are there. The only real downside that the forum requires you to use Javascript and won't work without it. It seems there is some history with other forums too, but I don't know about that much.

• Link: https://wizchan.org/

I have been browsing this place on and off since I was 14, but I am not particularly fond of it. It's basically the sex-obsession of normalfriends, but reversed. Instead of being obsessed with having sex, they are obsessed with not having sex. Some wizard will probably point out, this being only a recent development, and that in some point in time, it was better, but I think this is inherent to the site itself. It's just the theme of the site and you basically get what you asked for when, you make a forum for people, who define themselves by not having sex: a forum defined by people, who define themselves by not having sex.

• Link: http://textboard.org/
• Link2: http://bbs.ax/

This was a true gem. I am too young to have experienced the golden era of prog, but having had experienced SchemeBBS was an honor in itself. I loved that place and it was great. It was a very simple textboard written in MIT Scheme, having just enough to talk about programming and computers and barely anything else. There also was mona, which was an utterly dead board for otaku and an off-topic board called sol. Of course, I see it with rose-tinted glasses now that it's gone, but I think it was, besides the typical spam and shitposting, just a really good place and I enjoyed it.

• Link: https://www.linuxquestions.org/

I used to be quite active on this one, but not anymore these days. It's main focus is obviously being a Linux tech support forum, which it does a fine job at, but for all other things it isn't very well suited (posting "Unix porn" for example or having huge holy wars about Linux distros). Sadly, they use Google spyware scripts and the ominous MITM Cloudflare, which is not a death sentence, but makes the forum considerably worse, in my opinion.

• Link: https://www.lainchan.org/

This is another place, where I am not very knowledgeable about it's history. I know there was an old admin, who killed himself, perhaps this kalyx guy, then there was lainchan.jp, arisuchan was also a thing at some point in time and now the current thing is Lainchan.org administrated by Appleman1234. The place encompasses several boards for various cyberpunk discussion needs, such as sec for computer security, anonymity and privacy, the λ for programming, tech for computers and related stuff in general. There is also hum as a board to talk about your personal problems…ehh..humanity. Interestingly there is also drg and zzz, which are quite interesting boards to lurk in; for the discussion of psychoactive drugs and consciousness respectively. Lainchan is one of my favorite imageboards and I think it's quite pleasant to browse.

• Link: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php

Agora Road is quite an interesting place, however I never came around to post on there, despite having an account on there. Mostly because I feel like a secondary on there, due to the place focusing on Vaporwave and retro computing, while I'm only interested in the discussions on the Internet and all things surrounding it. Lurking there sure is fun, but I don't feel qualified to rate this forum.

• Link: https://forums.nesdev.org

If your NES programming answer isn't in the NESDev Wiki, it's probably somewhere in the forum, and even if not, then you can still ask there, as it's still relatively populated by knowledgeable people. It's probably as active as you would expect a forum for a niche topic like NES programming in the current year, which means there are people, it's just not instant. The design is also kind of pleasant to look at, but that's beside my point.

• Link: https://world2ch.net

I have somewhat disorganized thoughts on this matter and don't really have a good conclusion. Certainly it's good to have another textboard, textboards are a nice medium of communication, and I really like them better than regular forums or imageboards (See the small rant below), the problem with this one in particular is that they try to revive something that hasn't ever been alive in first place. There is a difference between appropriating culture and making it your own thing over time and just imitating culture, LARPing culture so to say. World2ch was already in 2003 an anglophonic LARP of 2ch culture, however managed to make something of it's own out of it.

(Such is my impression from just looking at it from now, without ever having been there myself. See this impression the same way as somebody, who is very interested in some foreign country, without ever payed that country a visit.)

This revival website now wants to go back in time and LARP as something that is in itself just a LARP of something that was 20 years ago. They explicitely don't want new culture to manifest, they only want to pretend like it's 1999 and as if not everybody has moved on already:

1. Do not post any content of or related to modern imageboard/BBS culture. This mostly covers modern internet slang/content.

I think it would be good for that site, if they stopped pretending to be something they're not, because such efforts will never be genuine and the real thing, and focus more on just having a fun textboard to post on. This is the same thing as all those sites on Neocities and Nekoweb trying really hard to imitate the "90's Internet" with their "Under Construction" GIFs, webbuttons, and glittery night sky background, where their time would be much better invested in creating new interesting culture, instead of doing some disingeneous LARP fest.

(This is a small rant about the functionality of images on imageboards, that has nothing to do with World2ch, you can ignore it, I just don't have any better place for it, so I'll leave it here.

This stems mostly from the fact how imageboards ought to work and how they actually work, or at least how they work currently. I feel like for many people images on imageboards have being something to decorate your post with, make it more interesting, but rarely it's the gist of the post. Maybe in some elden times, images actually were aiding the discussion, with memes, OC/art, screenshots, and so on being the post's focus, still ever since I started using imageboards around 2018/2019, it seems like this hasn't been the case for quite some time now. I'd go even further and claim that images are hurting the discussion, because you don't have to post a long text to get your point across and just post a Xitter screenshot accompanied with "Is this true?", or some similar effortless flamebaiting phrase. The imageboard format, as opposed to textboards, encourages low effort posting, in my opinion. This is not to say there aren't imageboards, where people actually effortpost, but there is always an exception to the rule, which doesn't mean the general notion isn't true. Note how I don't think every post has to be an effort post, where you write half a dissertation, or a second Bible into, just casual chit-chat can be fun too, I'm specifically talking about low effort flamebaiting.)