@ethin
Sometimes software just works. You are right that the forum's codebase is probably fragile, but in terms of the frontend this style of thing just works. There's no particular need to modernize it so why would you? I mean obviously you would because the backend issues, but the frontend is fine here. Discourse or whatever isn't necessarily bad but even I will agree with everyone else that this site is one of the smoothest experiences out there for forums if you're blind.
If someone got the few things that were broke handled--and this duplicate topics one is definitely on that list--this could run another 10 to 20 years without significant code changes anywhere. Forum software only has to do like 4 or 5 things at most.
Switching to Discourse or insert other solution is an answer to the issues but "it's technically better" just doesn't apply a lot.
@41
They probably have had spam issues. You can't exactly stop this level of trolling, only moderate it after the fact. The things that prevent such things are social. Bots may be blocked, but what's going on here isn't and has never been bots. Show the average blind teen a bug this easy to exploit in an environment where there are few consequences and only semi-active mods and it's well known that no one has good access to all the backend stuff? That's the recipe for failure and it's entirely social/organizational. You can software away specific bugs like this one, but someone could do the same thing with a tiny Python script easily enough without the bug. Honestly I even wonder if that's what happened here, because triggering the bug reliably enough to get thousands of topics seems way harder and less likely to work, and the script would be insultingly easy.
No matter where we go, if we just magically transplant everyone like transplanting the garden, these issues will come along for the ride. Fixing them requires social changes.
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