Hey, we're already rating browsers, mail providers, addons...so why not forums? After all, since most of the discussion has moved to giant corpo platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, it is particularly important to find a way to separate yourself from those. The most important criterion will be what is required to register and post. Why is recaptcha so penalized? Simply, it is heavily exploitative - pretty much making you into a dog performing tricks for its master ("Hey Spike, show me the fire hydrants! Good boy...now the crosswalks!"). And if you screw up, it's back to the drawing board, you bad doggie you. You have no idea when the reward (being allowed to register) is coming, either - maybe your master will be forgiving and force you to perform only three tricks this time? Low tier is the best rating a forum with recaptcha can get. Hcaptcha is slightly better as it usually only requires clicking a button - but it still requires JS and has some privacy issues, so also incurs penalty. June 2026 edit: Anubis might be treated better than recaptcha, because you can leave the tab open and wait for the forum to load. It will still be penalized because some browsers and / or browser settings fail with it, and the errors can be completely misleading and debugging tough.
Why is blocking anonymizers punished even more? Because it makes connecting everything you do on the forum to your real identity that much easier. You know, these days people even get arrested for comments that the so-called "elites" didn't like - and with a VPN, they could have avoided it. Therefore, if the admins include that "feature", it pretty much means they're supporting this Technological slavery system. Any forum that has forced deanonymization will not get a rating higher than Very low - leaving space for Shit if it has other flaws.
Other criteria taken into account are privacy issues other than anonymization acceptance (such as asking for your real name), quality of moderation (penalizing arbitrary censorship / micromanagement of your posts), amount of activity, quality of discussion, JavaScript dependence, and anything else that comes to mind. But even if a forum scores well in the above categories, it won't reach Mid tier as long as it exploits people with anonymizer blocking or recaptcha. Anonymization was tested with RiseUp VPN and TOR - more popular VPNs might still be blocked; if you encounter that - message me so I can modify the ratings. If you have any additional data for any forum listed here (or a new one), message me as well so I can add it.
This is really similar to 8chan now, even with similar activity levels. Does not require bullshit to post, I was even able to avoid enabling JS and cookies. Use the onion domain (it never fucking works btw) since the regular address is still behind Cloudflare (UPDATE February 2025: not anymore now again in June 2026). CF and access problems through onion sends it to Mid tier.
UPDATE June 2026: Not Cloudflared anymore. Has a demanding PoW needed to access but at least it let me through unlike Anubis (if you are spoofing your referer, it won't, though - and it also won't tell you it's because of it). The PoW doesn't require JS, weirdly enough. Old onion is dead and the new one is here.
After waiting for the PoW to finish, you can finally read...but still not post because you need to solve a captcha (somewhat hard to read, too) which is supposed to activate your "block bypass". But in my Pale Moon it just says "Wrong or expired captcha" (even if I typed in 5 seconds) and gives me another one. Over and over - and of course nothing debuggable is shown. It does work properly on unmodified ungoogled-chromium, though. But so what? It then launches another fat PoW before it lets your post through...and you will need another block bypass a few hours later according to the FAQ. I tried a few things to solve the captcha...and boom! The original PoW is repeating. This is really unusable... but due to not blocking anonymizers and decent content to read (and relative free speech if you can deal with the PoWs) I'll settle for Very low tier.
This used to be a great imageboard I've loved posting on. Unfortunately, they recently have been framed into allegedly having a killer post on their boards (when in reality he posted his manifesto on Instagram and it was simply reposted by someone else). Their CDN (the evil CloudFlare - MozArchive) then took it down because of an alleged harm caused by 8chan (despite hosting actual criminals - MozArchive). I wanted to wait this whole situation out, thinking they will just get a new CDN within a few days (the admin posted an encouraging message on his twitter We are using the downtime now to scale 8chan's servers, networking, and software to be stronger for when we come back online
) but it hasn't happened and likely won't - and that's because 8chan is voluntarily down until Jim attends a congressional hearing. The date is September 5th
. He will have to explain the situation with the alleged shooters posting on 8chan and probably be probed with a million other questions. This used to be a top tier board that will now likely die (or become government-controlled) because the psychopaths in charge hated actual free speech and decided to bury it. The users have scattered around in many different places that are not quite the same. We're losing the internet, and fast.
UPDATE: I was right. 8chan got rebranded as 8kun and is a shadow of what it was before. Here's a list of the issues with it:
Disclaimer: this post and the subject matter and contents thereof - text, media, or otherwise - do not necessarily reflect the views of the 8kun administrationappears after every post.
UPDATE June 2020: some of those issues might be wrong now, I don't check out 8kun anymore. I still don't recommend going there and I certainly don't trust the administration. Also, if you're looking for activity, forget it - you'll only find that on the /pnd/ board (which is /pol/ in all but name) and the absolutely cancerous polish /vichan/ - /v/ has 0 PPH as of writing this, for example. Very low tier.
Same format as 8chan (but introduced persistent IDs five years ago, nullifying the anonymous aspect at least on the /pol/ board). UPDATE February 2025: now has hcaptcha (basically recaptcha) instead of its own captcha (which was a lot less violating) for every post. Paying for a 4chan pass can avoid the captcha and give you access to a premium board (yawn). Blocks TOR, VPN and proxies. Used to include malware (MozArchive). Cannot do much without JavaScript enabled - not even view the catalog. Uses Google Analytics. Not anymore, which I guess means they have their own. 4chan is Cuckflared. The only saving grace of this forum is the huge activity, but the content totally sucks from the little I've forced myself to read. Shit tier.
Recaptcha required to register. Absolutely terrible privacy policy (archive) (MozArchive) - pretty much a datamining operation, like Mozilla Firefox. For the first few days you will have random delays preventing you from posting at all. Reddit censors subreddits with alternative information (archive) (MozArchive), such as the 9/11 truth subreddit (archive) (MozArchive). July update: more banned subreddits. There's also shadowbanning going on - for example, my site is taboo on r/privacy; any posts with the mention of it will not appear. Also has literal bots moderating the boards (for example, deleting posts with the word "VPN" in them and threatening their posters). New UI is shit but can be changed; with the old UI, you can at least read the site with JavaScript disabled, but still cannot post. However, Reddit - unlike 4chan - allows posting through VPN. Downvote system makes it easy to bury posts that buckle the trend, creating a culture of conformity. UPDATE: now they also ban people for upvoting (archive - MozArchive) the posts they want to censor. Makes it even worse in terms of conformity, so it's best to avoid it altogether at this point - despite the huge activity. July 2020 update: also, ads cannot be bypassed through sorting by "new" anymore - and there are obnoxious ones all over. UPDATE August 2021: NoNewNormal, the best source of corona information and discussion, has recently been quarantined
. You can still access it, but can't search through it and it will likely be banned soon, as most other quarantined subs are (archive) (MozArchive). UPDATE: spez the cuck ended up banning NoNewNormal. Clearly, Reddshit - as the other big tech devils such as Wikipedia, Google, Twitter and FB - is in the business of promoting the evil corona restrictions and deleting everyone who dares to question them. Just put it in its coffin already.
UPDATE November 2025: it gives my VPN the white page treatment every so often, requiring me to wait some minutes until it graciously reveals itself. Can't load shit in my RSS client directly, either. Clicking images redirects to a "funny" link that actually isn't (edit: this was actually done by one of my URL Rewriter redirects. Still, it wouldn't happen if you could actually load images from reddit directly, instead of have it add some heavy page around them). Either way, discussions are shit quality and I suspect overrun by bots and hired propagandists. The only thing Reddshit is good for, anymore, is news; and sometimes for learning what the normiest of normie thinks. Even the subreddits that I used to think were decent (eg. KotakuInAction or the covid skeptic ones, or even LateStageCapitalism or antiwork) turned into swamplands.
UPDATE June 2026: BTW, don't think you're just going to take all the flaws on the chin because you want to take advantage of reddshit's reach to do some based activism. Reddshit commonly practices what's known as "shadowbanning" - AKA removing all your posts and your entire account from public visibility, but still letting you login so you won't know until you logout. The reasons are never stated and the only recourse is begging. Since Reddshit is still readable through anonymizers and even partially without JS, and also doesn't explicitly ban them for posting, nor needs revealing data, I'm going to slap it with a (very reluctant) Very low tier.
Reddit alternative. Registration requires only an username and a password (plus solving a simple text captcha). E-mail is optional if you want the option to reset your password. Absolute zero third party requests. IP is stored for 7 days but you can use a VPN and they provide an onion as well. Decently high activity but can't compare to Reddit of course. Has downvote system as well but unlike at Reddit, the posts are not automatically hidden. Warning: HEAVILY LEFTIST and of the bad (SJW) type - it has a section with a description of Death to whiteness
, for crying out loud. Despite alleging to dislike accusing others of malicious acts
, they will jump on you like rabid dogs for posting an opinion they don't like (though often in a roundabout way, since they are too weak to confront you directly). They criticize reddit for banning leftist subs for "no reason", but do the same to the users on their forum. If you're used to independent thought, forget about it - Raddle is a total echo chamber. Logic is scarce in any topic relating to feminism, sexism, homosexuality and all their other favorite victimhood issues. They even have a bot going around censoring certain words (archive) (MozArchive), which include stupid
, lame
and dumb
- but they themselves have no issue with calling someone a piece of shit or telling him to fuck himself. I could go on...this might be Raddle's only real flaw, but it's massive. That flaw, though, also allows you to discuss stuff you rarely can elsewhere, like shoplifting or anti-capitalism. But you can get most of the same in 8chan's leftypol board, with way saner people. I way misjudged these guys at the beginning - this is a disgusting, hypocritical, hateful bunch. UPDATE June 2026: now CF. Due to that and the above, I can't with good conscience give Raddle anything higher than Very low tier.
UPDATE June 2026: another decent place (for reading, at least) eaten by the CF monster. Also registration needs admin approval which I guess is better than the recaptcha + real name requirement that were there before. Low tier.
UPDATE February 2020: Has ReCaptcha now, but allows bypassing it by e-mailing the admin (2026 edit: this doesn't appear to be mentioned anymore, so you will have to cuck to google if you want to register). Simple UI, effective at least for reading (sorting is Reddit-style, which I don't like compared to forum-style, but there is no fluff). Comments appear immediately. Gigantic activity - a thread almost every minute. Despite HN's alleged focus on "quality posting", 90+% of the threads are big corpo tier trash. These assholes flag (censor) any thread that mentions my site, just so you know. Example 1 (archive) (MozArchive), 2 (archive) (MozArchive), and 3 (archive) (MozArchive). Thanks for the tens of thousands additional views :D. UPDATE June 2026: now throws me an undebuggable white page with "sorry" (not even a HTML tag in sight) whenever I visit a profile. If you want to mock me so much, then enjoy this Very low tier.
UPDATE June 2026: no more recaptcha (funnily enough, the new captcha always has the same answer that is easily botted so I don't see the point). Will say you are a spammer if you try to sign up through TOR, but otherwise JS-free registration and posting is possible. The first and maybe later posts need to be admin-approved, which seems pointless with all the other protections like the E-mail confirmation. Content is, well, it's just a distro forum, nothing special. I think it's appropriate to put this in Mid tier.
UPDATE June 2026: prepare for a looooong drag through the swamp. First of all, you don't register for the forums anymore, but for "Ubuntu One", which also allows access to the forums. Nicely following the footsteps of Microsoft / Google / Mozilla in having one master spy account. Let's check out what do they spy on:
We don't ask you for personal information unless we truly need it.
But you asked for my real name.
When you correspond with us by phone, calls may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.
And you truly need
this?
Canonical may also use third party providers for such services.
Even better.
This information includes the full Uniform Resource Locators (URL), clickstream to, through and from our site (including date and time, timezone, your geolocation), items you viewed or searched for, page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), methods used to browse away from the page.
More things they absolutely truly need
.
This is information we receive about you if you use any of the other websites we operate or the other services we provide.
Heh. They combine everything into a profile. That is what the "Ubuntu One" crap is for.
.In this case we will have informed you when we collected that data (through a Privacy notice) if we intend to share those data internally and combine it with data collected on this site. We will also have told you for what purpose we will share and combine your data.
Thanks for telling me how much am I being violated.
We are working closely with third parties (including, for example, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, payment and delivery services, advertising networks, analytics providers, search information providers, credit reference agencies)
All my data will go around the world with Canonical. Truly I can travel while sitting in my gaming chair, how amazing! But why do credit reference agencies
need my info? Perhaps to modify my credit score? Wikipedia appears to confirm this: For example, adequate credit information could facilitate lenders in screening and monitoring borrowers as well as avoiding giving loans to high risk individuals.[3] Lenders use this to evaluate credit worthiness, the ability to pay back a loan, and can affect the interest rate and other terms of a loan
.
We keep your order information for so long as reasonably required in accordance with our record retention policy. Your personal information associated with the order will then be removed.
This crap again? Just tell me for how long am I in danger of being fedded due to your insatiable appetite for spying.
Canonical seems to follow GDPR, and so you have the right to "restrict processing" and the right to "erasure" for example. Yet, the duration of request fulfillment is without undue delay
which could as well be years. Why do people tolerate this vagueness? This isn't an agreement, this is mockery. It's like buying a shirt, but the size is completely random. And yet, the entire digital world is based on such meaningless "agreements". If the legal system worked properly, such things would be completely banned and the corpos forced to disband and return all earnings to the people if caught doing that. But, it doesn't.
Okay, I'm tired of this already. Let me just add that Canonical admits to including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Reddit, Crazyegg, "Marketo Munchkin", "N. Rich" trackers, among others. They really are worse than even Mozilla.
But back to the forums. After you register and confirm the E-mail, you need to solve recaptcha. Yes after you've already given them your name (hopefully not the real one). Can I stop being mocked for once?
Shockingly, the code of conduct is decent. There isn't a litany of things that are banned to post, like almost everywhere else; it's basically a plea for respect, collaboration, basic human decency, etc. They even say they value meritocracy, decisiveness, and clarity - and speak against power abuse. Yet, how it all works in practice, I have no idea and won't get to check (E-mail me if you have some spicy dirt). My shock quickly evaporated because there is another document more specific to the forum that is quite restrictive - bans piracy, sexuality talk, etc. Not that a better ToS would save this trash pile of a forum.
For one, it uses discourse software (AKA worst forum software), which is heavily broken on Pale Moon (not even allowing registration). The resource demands of that are several times that of phpBB, again discriminating against people with old hardware (if it's really ancient, Discourse won't load at all) and breaking Canonical's stated diversity beliefs (unless the poor are not included?). The forum also appears to be focused entirely on things relevant to Ubuntu (no politics, games, music and similar stuff), which somewhat diminishes the earlier ToS issues.
No Cloudflare or anonymizer blocking saves this from the Shit tier. But in the end, because of the massive data grabbing and serious technical deficiencies I have to slap this with a rating of Very low tier.
No captcha, VPN allowed for registration and posting. No mod approval - immediate creation of posts and threads even for a new user. Fully usable without JavaScript. There's no personal data asked for either except maybe the country which you can fake. Sounds great, right? Well check this out:
when you post a message, upload a file, or otherwise provide us with material for display on the website, you are granting FedoraForum.org a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to: 1. Use, copy, sublicense, adapt, transmit, publicly perform or display any such communication. 2. Sublicense to third parties the unrestricted right to exercise any of the foregoing rights granted with respect to the communication.
And the cat's out of the bag! You give up ownership of anything you share on the forum at all. The privacy is also not that great:
Another example of information that we automatically collect as you navigate our site is information about your computer's connection to the Internet. This information allows us, among other things, to improve the delivery of our web pages to you and to measure traffic on our site.
They measure traffic
which likely means storing IP addresses - and the duration isn't given.
Information from Other Sources. FedoraForum.org may also obtain information about you from third parties or other sources and may combine the information that we receive from them with information we have already obtained about you.
So you create a profile of every user. Amazing. Other than that, they don't say much so we are left to guess. But it's not looking good. Still, all the other places don't even reach this point, so let's give it a Mid tier.
Captcha requires usage of Linux command line (lol). VPN allowed for registration and posting. No mod approval for accounts or the first post. No JS required. No third party requests. OK privacy policy. High activity. Elitist as fuck culture with a very restrictive "code of conduct" (for example - politics, religion, sports, rant threads are BANNED). As well as a bunch of other ways to micromanage the way you post - covering everything from bumping old threads and how to properly answer questions to image sizes and grammar. They even "discourage" recommendation threads, lol. I have no idea, though, how all that is enforced in practice. Check here (update: now requires logging in to view) to see the kinds of threads that get deleted. Wanted to give High at the beginning since the technical stuff is so good, but the people side (actual reason we come to a forum anyway) leaves a lot to be desired. Mid tier.
Cloudflare. Blocks TOR if you unblock Cloudflare. Blocks morty. The only way to read it is to use webarchive and hope the thread you want has been archived... Shit tier.
Cloudflare. At least doesn't block TOR if you have Cloudflare unblocked, so you can read. Can also be read through morty if you keep Cloudflare blocked. Registration requires recaptcha. Still, having to cuck to both CF and Google sends it straight to the Very low tier.
Needs JavaScript and cookies enabled to see anything. Doesn't block anonymizers. Registration requires hcaptcha. Low tier.
Cloudflared. If you try to reach through TOR, you get hit with "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue". Blocks morty. Even webarchive is blocked so you literally can't read anything. Funnily they ban discussion of hacking tools, the one thing the distro has been designed for. Shit tier.
Readable without JS and doesn't block anonymizers. Shitty discourse software makes it broken in Pale Moon (for example, can't see a button to register, and it froze my browser). Low tier.
Solving HCaptcha is now required for registration (as of July 2020 or maybe earlier - hope you're ready to perform tricks, Spike); VPN (but not TOR) allowed. Does not accept disposable e-mail or cock.li. First post has to be approved by the moderator. Decent privacy policy, but - In principle we store data only for as long as is reasonably necessary/commonly practiced to operate our sites and services
. And this can mean anything. At least it doesn't share your data with third parties. The regulars suffer from attitude problems, and threads critizing them or their browser are randomly closed (archive) (MozArchive) despite not being inflammatory. The TOR-hating sucks, but you can still use a VPN and the discussion quality is fine enough fell of a cliff recently thanks to infighting, especially certain devs being confrontational for no reason. There's still a lot of good content to find there if you dig deep and just limit yourself to reading. UPDATE June 2026: anupiss needs JS and cookies to graciously let you through - even just to read. But somehow even when I enable those, it claims after that my browser doesn't support cookies (a total lie). Since I cannot even access it, the rating is Very low tier.
Cloudflare. Needs cookies and JS to see anything even if you are not blocking Cloudflare. Very low tier.
Readable without JS. Hcaptcha required to register. Though it is less exploitative than recaptcha, there are still privacy issues with it, so Low tier.
Thread list can be seen without JS. Threads themselves can also be read, but only partially because the Show more replies
option is gatekept by JS. Signing up and even seemingly login requires recaptcha. UI is some real abomination, and slow... The forum also turns certain words into Amazon referal links. Very low tier.
Registration requires a written justification, but that's much better than a recaptcha. Unfortunately requires JavaScript for any kind of interaction. June edit: new UI got totally fucked, what a joke - as if it wasn't terrible enough in the first place. Very low activity, and what's there consists mostly of reporting problems with the Disroot services. Allows VPN and has a great privacy policy; doesn't make a single third-party request either. Still, with activity so low as to be almost dead, I can only put it in Mid tier UPDATE June 2026: anupiss with difficulty "16" seems to need a year for my craptop to get in (I waited 15 minutes and the bar didn't fill up AT ALL!). Thanks for fighting big tech while letting only rich people access! Very low tier.
Readable without JS. Yet needs recaptcha to register. Low tier.
Cloudflared and will attempt to "scan your browser". But only needs cookies to get through. Then you can freely read, even through TOR. But if you want to register you'll need to solve recaptcha. CF+G means Very low tier.
Thread lists and the threads themselves can be read without JS, though the Latest updated threads
functionality doesn't work. Good content to read (probably the best paranormal-related place on the Internet), but needs recaptcha to register, therefore Low tier.
UPDATE June 2026: now also CF, solidyfing the shit tier.
UPDATE February 2024: ha ha ha, RPF has just killed itself in a spectatular train wreck. The admin completely changed focus from Ray Peat's work to his made up "low Vitamin A / low toxin diet" and has plastered it all over the place, so much that you have to scroll down to see the actual forum. Those ideas are completely contrary to what Ray Peat believed but yet his name is still being attached to it, confusing newbies and possibly harming people. Yesterday you had to agree to some cringe "contract" to even be able to read the site. Today, that changed to this:
Guest viewing is limited
- You have a limited number of page views remaining
- 9 guest views remaining
- Register now to remove this limitation
No comment. Anonymizers are still banned. Registration requires a birth date, location and solving hcaptcha. Please leave this unethical place if you're still there. Shit tier.
Enforces a Cloudflare browser check that needs JavaScript and cookies to pass. ReCaptcha required to sign up. Very low tier.
I thought I finally found a forum that's relatively sane. Though it does require enabling (first-party) JS to register, there is no TOR block or personal data requirement, and only a simple captcha to solve. Confirmation through E-mail and boom, you're done, right? Wrong. You're required to write a fucking autobiography in the Introduce Yourself section of the forum, before being allowed to post anywhere else - and if you try to make your first post elsewhere, the forum software will redirect you
. Holy shit, I just wanted to help someone's medical issues and GTFO. I hope you're happy with all those people in *that* thread missing information that could have saved their lives, Phoenix Rising administration. I also found a few other places talking about this specific issue, and they were all Cloudflared. Why is everything so fucked? UPDATE June 2026: Heh. CF claimed this now, too. Very low tier.
Everything fucking sucks even more in June 2026. Many decent places died or became worse (adding CF, anupiss, etc). Come join the diggy forums which run phpBB (fast, good looking, featureful, and mostly JS independent), support anonymizers and are accessible through an onion, don't save IP addresses, don't require any personal data. We even have additional privacy features like hiding profile fields from certain people or groups. The only possible "problem" is that your first 3 posts have to be approved by a moderator before you are able to post freely. It might be annoying but it's the only way I could come up with to resist advertisers, doxers or other malicious actors without resorting to AI or similar undesirable "solutions". If I know you, though, I can lift the requirement straight after registration.
List of forums that used to be reviewed here, but died: Prison Planet, Saidit, Julay.world, Voat, Final Fantasy Shrine, Squid Board, Cracking Paradox, Nanochan.
