this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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bit of lore about the word "forum"
you would think it was the centralized providers marketing that moved from the word first but in reality it was the forums themselves. When you didn't want your employees wasting time on the internet you would block certain words in the URI rather than certain domains. Words like "forum" and "chat" were perma-filtered at many workplaces like reddit or some other sites are today.
Many sites migrated away from using the word "forum" initially by hacking up thier default forum installs (some of those early php apps SUCKED) years before subs.
1-letter path names became a good way to obfuscate.
Wouldn't surprise me. The industry jumped over to "HTTPS everywhere" as soon as it was politically convenient — but one good reason was to prevent people from building "filtering" middleware without having to hire someone who understood enough of Bruce Schneier to explain why filtering URLs wasn't a thing you wanted to be doing in the first place.