It was never solved. Forum software just stagnated with its poor backend and frontend solutions that everyone tolerated until the social media platforms we know today took off.
Now that even the most unsophisticated user has become intolerant of the noise on there, forums are coming back.
But, you can't expect people to go back to the same problems they left behind over a decade ago. Just about any modern CMS is a dramatic improvement over the crappy database schemas, dead languages, ugly, inflexible, and slow server-side rendered HTML, etc. Just about any frontend a college student whips up would have modern features people actually want to use and be far easier to maintain. What was "solved" is the realization that forums are just another CRUD app. The specific implementation is irrelevant as long as it is architected as such.
It was never solved. Forum software just stagnated with its poor backend and frontend solutions that everyone tolerated until the social media platforms we know today took off.
Now that even the most unsophisticated user has become intolerant of the noise on there, forums are coming back.
But, you can't expect people to go back to the same problems they left behind over a decade ago. Just about any modern CMS is a dramatic improvement over the crappy database schemas, dead languages, ugly, inflexible, and slow server-side rendered HTML, etc. Just about any frontend a college student whips up would have modern features people actually want to use and be far easier to maintain. What was "solved" is the realization that forums are just another CRUD app. The specific implementation is irrelevant as long as it is architected as such.