That's what filters were for. And not only to filter out nutters and trolls, but the typical idiot subjects like "Help!!!", "urgent" or classics like "$$$". A few such rules were all it took. Plus clever stuff like "if user X and user Y appear both in a subthread then filter the whole subthread from the point where either X or Y showed up". Try that with SMF ...
Shame many people don't know how to do that or don't want to do that, so they get bombarded with the crap and eventually leave.
Same for newcomers, all they see is the vitriol and never want to contribute.
The result is the group eventually dies, with only the die-hards left.
That just depended on the quality of your ISP and if they had a clue or not to manage a news server with proper connections to other news servers. Combining two or more feeds for increased reliability also was no problem.
Great, so a community that is dependant upon your ISP? That's a good idea!
Not everyone gets to chose their ISP.
The free various news servers were not much better. The paid ones were a bit bitter, but not everyone wants to pay to access usenet.
The amount of times I had to chop and change news servers was ridiculous.
It was all simply a PITA.
And don't tell us forum software works flawlessly and any ISP will do. How often did you have to change ISP now because the ISP sucked? How often users still get database errors?
Much less hassle than usenet!
I've had 3 web hosts in 4 years for this forum (ISP has nothing to do with it!)
The first was cheap shared host that has worked flawlessly for me for 10 years, but eventually got too slow to handle all the load of the blog, the forum, all my websites, and the video streaming.
The 2nd one was simply a bad choice, they were a cloud company that had too many issues, so I ditched them.
The third is a proper dedicated server tat costs real $$$. Not given a single problem since day one.
The forum either works 100%, and everyone sees the same stuff in real time, or it doesn't work at all. Much better than the hotch-potch that is usenet, that depends upon which ISP and/or news server you chose, how all the server propagation works, and which reader program you chose to use and how you set it up.
With a BBS web forum, everyone everywhere gets the same experience and instant data access. No program required, use any machine, any O/S, anywhere, any time. Your ISP only determines how fast the page is loaded.
And yes, the forum software works flawlessly. I have not really found one bug in all the years I've been running various BBS forums, certainly not any show stoppers. There are the odd minor things that simply gets fixed in the next update of course.
The thing with a forum, is that once it's set up and running, then it just works the same for everyone. Only the owner has to worry about keeping it running, the users just use it.
Strange, the file sharers who have taken over news, manage to do that just fine, distributing whole videos. And in the old days we already had the binary groups to upload files, including images. Of course only if your ISP didn't suck and did carry the binary groups.
Once again, not everyone gets to chose their ISP. Binary groups was an awful service! That why most didn't use it, so usenet ended up being a hotpotch of people storing files anywhere they could. Their own ISP directory, temporary upload websites, etc. It was a mess. Or they simply didn't share anything because it was all too hard.
And really, these modern script kiddies writing forum software could learn a thing or two from those old news readers. Filter, searching, sorting, automating, topic tree representation, editors, navigation between postings, effective use of a database (how many DB queries does SMF do to show a simple thread?), to name a few.
Most people aren't complaining about the features offered by modern BBS forums.
I used to be one of the top posters on a usenet electronics group, and I do not miss it one bit. BBS style forums are superior in usability in almost every way.
Dave.