this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
20 points (66.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43852 readers
1016 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
bit of lore about the word "forum"
you would think it was the centralized providers marketing that moved from the word first but in reality it was the forums themselves. When you didn't want your employees wasting time on the internet you would block certain words in the URI rather than certain domains. Words like "forum" and "chat" were perma-filtered at many workplaces like reddit or some other sites are today.
Many sites migrated away from using the word "forum" initially by hacking up thier default forum installs (some of those early php apps SUCKED) years before subs.
1-letter path names became a good way to obfuscate.
Wouldn't surprise me. The industry jumped over to "HTTPS everywhere" as soon as it was politically convenient — but one good reason was to prevent people from building "filtering" middleware without having to hire someone who understood enough of Bruce Schneier to explain why filtering URLs wasn't a thing you wanted to be doing in the first place.