The return of the BB

A little over a year ago, we took a big digital swing with Computer Club. All internet wisdom dictated we would miss miserably. Luckily, it went exactly as we had hoped: we now have a vibrant forum. Our cozy, self-hosted haven on the web.

Previously on Computer Club

Soon after launching our podcast in 2018, it became clear the word 'Club' would be more than a cheeky joke. People turned up for in-person meetups. And our Facebook Group soon took up a life of its own.

A few years in, having a presence on Facebook just didn't feel right anymore. We decided to close up shop, and move to a members-only Signal group. (Computer Club has some 500 members, who own merch or contribute monthly.) Unsurprisingly, that soon became cluttered.

Our next move was a Slack space. The channels, threading and emoji-reactions were great. But only people who were on Slack for work visited our space. Then Slack kept removing things in the Free-tier. So what do you do?

We felt we had one more move in us. But this time, we wanted to own our clubhouse. So no Discord or Reddit. Being believers in 'the small web' and growing up on discussion boards, we thought, how about ... and old-school forum?

Starting an online community from scratch? At a new destination? That people would actively have to seek out? It probably shouldn't have worked. But it did.

Here's what I personally love about our forum.

Great content by great people

At first, we thought we'd have to kickstart the forum and keep it top of mind. For instance, every week, we launch a poll or discussion based on a topic in the podcast.

Although those are great, the real value is stuff our members come up with.

Just some examples of great threads:

• Tips for the best telco on a budget.
• Home Asssistant tips.
• Personal Finance Management advice and tools
• Buying advice always works great. Someone actually wrote a whole buying guide for TVs.

Here's why it works:

• You only need a few to tango. A few active members and you have a lively community. (There's quite a lot of 'lurkers', who just read. Give them time, you will eventually become a poster.)
• Geeks are the best people to ask for tech advice. Geeks also love to share their advice. A win-win.

What's especially great, is when things happen without your involvement, but perfectly fit your community:

• Enthusiasts starting competitions to predict the Tour de France or the Euros.
• People actually starting a company together, to help medical teams at festivals.

Discourse is great software

We use a self-hosted version of Discourse, open-source forum software. Out of the box, it covers everything. There's plugins too.

I'm especially fond of its great web app. It's a mainstay on my home screen, and it works great.

And if the web app or the email digests weren't enough to keep the forum top of mind: one of our members actually created a browser extension, that shows the forum (and our content) when opening a new tab.

ASCII all the way

The fun thing about Computer Club is that we have a lot of different brand marks, all tapping into that sweet, sweet tech nostalgia. Have a look at our website to see what I mean.

The vanilla Discourse theme works exactly as needed, but we still wanted to give our forum a distinct look and feel. True to the bbs spirit, we went for ASCII-visuals, and mono fonts.

Here's an example of the forum categories:

I spent a lot of time getting this scroll animation just right.

We're so fond of our ASCII-branding, we turned it into merch.

Badges, baby

It's a forum, so of course we have custom badges that people can earn, and display next to their username.

When people join the forum, it automatically checks if they're a paying member, so they instantly get their 'friendship' badge. Or if people became a member, it checks the forum, and auto-assigns their badge if they have an account there.

We also host a yearly, in-person Mario Kart and FIFA tournament, where the winners get a forum badge as well.

More gamification with actual rewards

For the one-year anniversary of our forum, we wanted introduced a 'kudos system'. People who read, post, help out, ... earn points, which we call 'Floppies'.

What really clicked: Floppies can be turned into a discount on our webshop, with 1 Floppy = 1 cent. Tens of people earned a discount of 5 euros or more.

I love it

I couldn't be more happier with how our forum turned out. Huge thanks to our webmaster, Diewy, for helping us!