Online bulletin board

An online bulletin board is a virtual bulletin board accessible via the internet. The purpose is to collect subject-specific 'topics' from users, which in turn link to a textual post that elaborates on the topic. Below (or linked) to the original textual post ("original post") may be comments from users which constitutes a "thread".

Bulletin boards are accessible via multiple TCP application protocols, including Telnet, HTTP, and Gemini. HTTP bulletin boards are the most common as of 2026.

History

Pre-history

Community Memory

Community Memory was the first public computerized bulletin board system, but did not run on the internet. It ran on a single XDS-940 timesharing computer located in San Francisco, California USA. Unlike later technology which utilized independent computers communicating, Community Memory was networked via specialized dumb terminals to a single computer. The dumb terminals were placed in public areas and were also given by Community Memory to interested parties who requested a terminal. Community Memory shut down in 1992.

1978-1990s

BBSs

While popularized during the 1980s, in 1978 Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public BBS ("Bulletin Board System") for independent consumer computers, which they dubbed CBBS for "Computerized Bulletin Board System". During the 1980s and early 1990s, more people began self-hosting BBSs.

During the beginning of BBSs, users would hook their computer to their home phone network to directly "dial in" to a remote BBS via a modem, in order to interact with textual bulletin board posts. Comments were attached to original posts typically via a link system rather than listing comments below an original post. Being terminal based, BBSs relied on ASCII characters and art. Media files were not part of BBS posts, but BBSs often hosted media files and games separately from the bulletin board, and accessible via their introductory user menu. Popular media formats hosted on BBSs at the time included GRASP animation files and GIF images.

Multiple BBSs chose to participate in being interlinked via a central hub called Fidonet.

After consumer ISPs became widespread, BBSs were accessible on the internet via Telnet. Modern BBSs are also accessible via SSH ("secure shell") as of 2026, in order to maintain password and connection privacy.

While HTTP boards are more popular than BBS boards worldwide as of 2026, some countries still use BBSs to a very large extent, including Taiwan.

Mu* boards

The first MUD or Multi-User-Dungeon was birthed in 1978, where multiple users on a DEC PDP-10 could join each other in a text based RPG adventure. These became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as multi-user RPGs using dial-up, a terminal and telnet. They often have their own bulletin boards that vary in how they were implemented. Hundreds still exist in English language via Telnet.

Variations of MUDs emerged including MUCKs and MUSHs, collectively called Mu*.

Usenet

Usenet bulletin boards were also popular in the 1980s and 1990s and differed from BBSs in that many comments could be downloaded at once to be read offline in order to save costs from home internet traffic. Usenet servers can be hosted by anyone but are typically synchronized by ISPs or Usenet providers which act as a central hub to browse Usenet posts. Google purchased Usenet aggregators and hosts enormous amounts of old Usenet posts. It calls this "Google Groups", but no longer allows interacting with Usenet posts, essentially just serving as a Usenet archive now. Today, automatic access to Usenet aggregators is no longer bundled with ISP internet access and usually comes with a small monetary fee.

CGI script boards

Early 1990s bulletin board software often used CGI scripting on the server side. These were text-heavy and typically did not rely much on images. Thread titles and comments often each had titles and were often presented in sequential order using a <ul><li> bullet point structure of hyperlinks.

2000s

PHPbb-style boards

The year 2000 saw the birth of PHP BBcode boards which used PHPbb bulletin board software. The PHP code executes on the server side, and the resulting rendered content is made accessible using very complex HTTP client software that automatically presents HTML, JPG, PNG, and GIF files, among other content types to the user. Static and animated media is presented within bulletin board posts and comments, creating an immersive, multi-media experience, a stark contrast to prior bulletin board software. Users can also style their comments using a markup language called BBcode. Comments are bundled in multiple hyperlinked pages ("paginated threads").

Notable PHP BBcode boards used today include Xenforo, SimpleMachines, and FluxBB.

Imageboards

Imageboards differ from PHPbb style bulletin boards in that individual threads are advertised to users primarily via images. Imageboard threads can have a dedicated textual title, but they are usually dwarfed in size compared to the image that is presented.

Infinitely scrolling boards

In the early 2000s, new bulletin board software rejected the PHPbb method of paginating threads, preferring to have every single comment accessible via scrolling down the HTTP webpage with your mouse, no matter how long the thread. In threads with a large number of comments, the later ones are dynamically loaded to HTTP clients upon further scrolling. Reddit used to be paginated but implemented this bulletin board style later. Reddit also developed its own thread indexing system reliant on original post quality rankings from users instead of indexing based on the date of the last comment on a thread.

Facebook also implemented dynamically loaded infinite scroll bulletin boards, and hosts many thousands of these bulletin boards, which it calls "Facebook Groups". Notably these groups do not have sub-boards, and browsing a single forum can take sometimes hours of scrolling down if the group has a long history.

Modern, self-hosted forum software that use infinite scroll include Discourse and Flarum.

2020s

Gemini boards

The Gemini TCP application protocol was launched in 2019, and bulletin boards started popping up on "Geminispace" in the 2020s. The style of bulletin boards here vary, and include imageboards as well as more traditional title-based boards. Gemini is meant to be more simple to code servers and clients for, compared to HTTP and Telnet. As a result, its protocol is relatively very simple. Clients typically prefer to not render images at all, or, at the most, make image rendering optional on a per-image basis.

See also

• Internet
• GRASP
• Software