Other IP forums

[fb]

LinkedIn used to have good IP forums but became overrun with newsletter graphics and are no longer usable. Anyone know of any other forums (or properly run LinkedIn forums) that cover patent topics? Facebook also has a few but are mostly newsletter graphics.

[MAK-LEGAL]

I am looking for the same. Can i have links of the ones where people are seriously willing for IP services.

[snapshot]

iptalk.pro used to be a thing but that is now gone.

I suppose you could wade into the comment sections at IPWatchdog or PatentlyO, but the discourse there is generally terrible, full of people slinging insults at each other and wild conspiracy theories.

[ThomasPaine]

Mr. IP Law is the best patent law blog out there.

[fb]

The Mr IP is a blog, and looks nice, but how about a place to post questions.

[NoMotivation]

/r/Patents on reddit appears to be a curated news aggregator; /r/patentlaw appears to have about one post per day and most of the posts are career advice queries.

[jeff.oneill]

I was considering starting a forum on the Patent Bots website (https://www.patentbots.com) using modern forum software. 

My first choice of forum software is currently Discourse (https://www.discourse.org).

If there is a lot of interest, I can make this higher priority.

[fb]

I prefer vBulletin.

[jeff.oneill]

I prefer vBulletin.

What about vBulletin do you like better than Discourse?   A quick web search suggests that Discourse is preferred by most people.

[MYK]

I prefer vBulletin.

What about vBulletin do you like better than Discourse?   A quick web search suggests that Discourse is preferred by most people.

I truly despise Discourse.  It absolutely sucks.  If a thread gets long, its infinite-scroll load-everything-into-one-page thing takes forever to load, is a pain to navigate, and will eventually cause a browser to crash (because guess what, it eats up memory to make a single "page" that contains 7500+ posts like our "Working for the USPTO" thread).  If you turn off Javascript so that you're not stuck in Discourse's infinite-scroll "feature", then you cannot do anything other than read the pages.  It randomly logs you out, often within moments of logging in.  I don't think it's possible to use a worse forum software package, because if one exists, no one would install it.

VBulletin and the other normal web forums (such as SMF, the one this site uses, or WebBBS) actually work.  They may or may not have their quirks, and maybe they look old-fashioned, but they are functional.  Unlike Discourse.

[NoMotivation]

Another one in the vBulletin vein is phpBB, which is decent and has a number of good extensions available, but is a little burdensome to keep updated to the latest version with periodic upgrades requiring a little bit of thinking and troubleshooting (every time you upgrade, something breaks).

[ConfusedIP]

Anyone remember Greedy associates back in early 2000s?  They used to give out pretty good career advice. Too bad they got shut down.

Personally, I like this board and don't think that a  switch to a newer forum software would be necessarily better. It's not fast or fancy, but gets the job done. It's not the software but the folks who post here that make this board what it is.