Topic: Why is this forum on SMF? (Read 155 times)

Well, as Satoshi created the forum only Satoshi would know the answers to your questions. What and why Satoshi did or did not take in to consideration or what the reasons were for Satoshi using a particular forum back in 2011 is something we could all speculate about but would not have a definitive answer to. Maybe one of the admins would be able to provide some answers.

I think you missed OP's point. I think OP refer to either SEO boost or ability to let people guess topic of the link without opening the link itself.


But it could be prevented if the forum software either create multiple permalink or preserve current URL even when the title is edited.

The forum is a carry-over from the previous forums, which first existed at bitcoin.sourceforge.net and then bitcoin.org, where it used the same software as it does today (minus some modifications made by theymos and others over the years). SMF was the most popular type of forum software at the time -- it got the job done in terms of providing a place where people could discuss bitcoin and its development.

When satoshi references "the old forum" in his famous introduction post, he's referring to an even more primitive forum on SourceForge. Its hard to find many screenshots of it but it looked something like this:



Here's a good article about this history of The Bitcoin Forum, in all 3 of its iterations:

https://blog.bitmex.com/the-bitcoin-forum/

BBPRESS a Wordpress-based forum are one of the forum that will show the title of the thread on the URL but they lack features that will make discussions stand out.

SMF is the best forum software when Satoshi is thinking of a platform for Bitcoin discussion

So far the forum has reached its popularity because of its simplicity in hosting discussions about Bitcoin.

Changing topic titles may mean URLs also get altered.  Some good reasons exist, however, for keeping URLs static rather than dynamic.  Firstly, search engines can index unchanging URLs more easily.  Second point - user-friendliness; folks bookmarking threads need assurance the URL leads back no matter if tweaks occur to the title.

It isn't a demerit as far as I know because it's better in that way for many people. We don't need the title of a thread in a URL as that's not necessary at all, and trust me no one reads the title of a URL that much these days.
This forum is based on an old version of SMF and it hasn't been upgraded in years and it may never get any update ever. The new versions of the SMF will change the whole look of the forum and many members are against such changes. I enjoy this forum the way it is because it's one the best looking forums on the internet, and I don't think that the forums needs an update just to have tile or contents of a thread on the URLs or for any other purpose.
Yes, there are many benefits for SMF over other popular forum software. The main benefit of SMF is its simplicity and ease of use. You can load SMF based forum on a low-end device without any lags or delays and I believe it adds less burden on the host that's hosting the SMF on their system. Mostly the forums with low traffic are hosted on cheap VPS servers and SMF works like a charm for such forums.

Its never a demerit for this forum not including title of thread in the URL because it can still be included.

I guess we have discussed issue some time ago, it only requires the admin to do alot of work before title can be included in a thread URL. Mean while that update was only included in SMF version 2.0 hence this forum operate on version 1. 1. 19. though it can still be done but at a very high risk.

Hence I suggest it shouldn't be change anyways because there have been millions of threads since the forum was built and trying to change this just for some people could lead to a crash in the forum if not well taken care of.

If you wish to try update your personal forum you can go to admin panel: Configuration -> Modification Settings-> Miscellaneous and change it from there, but it's at owners risk.


Back then when this forum was created it was not yet an issues for people to include title of a thread in their URL, that update was initiated in 2010 and this forum was created in 2009 or below.

You can't compare this SMF with other forum software providers because it has a high Level of privacy that others don't have. Satoshi knew what he wanted by using SMF because even your IP address can be released to anyone not even the admin that is the level of privacy it has plus other factors.

According to Wikipedia, the first public beta release of XenForo was released in October 2010, with a stable version released in March 2011. As far as I know, this forum is older than that. And as for vBulletin, it is proprietary software, not open-source.

Do you mean permalink, a forum script is very different from WordPress where the title of the topic shows up in the URL I don't think it is a demerit because even if the title is not showing in the URL the search engine will still catch it, like you create this thread 15 minutes ago and Google index it right away.
SMF is the best script for community discussion because of hundreds of modifications to make it attractive and conducive to disscussion.

Recently I installed a forum for testing. I used phpbb on it but later I realised that it has a big demerit that the URL it gives does not contain the content of title of thread. I checked this forum and here also the issue is same. Was this not taken into consideration while choosing forum software ? Or does it not matter much? Are there some special benefits of SMF over other popular forum softwares like xenforo or vbulletin?