It was a collection of silly quotes from IRC channels everywhere, many of which dated back to the 90s. It was rarely ever updated in the 2010s, but now, the URL no longer resolves.
Last capture was July 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230601000000*/bash.org
EDIT Someone archived all the quotes on the Internet Archive.
Joining to browse is in no way a good thing. Join to speak, yes. Join to read, no.
I think your view of servers here is wrong. They are literally named communities, as in private spaces. You get access if you’re part of that community, otherwise you don’t.
Discord servers are not public websites or a wiki anyone can access, they are not supposed to be.
IRC is a tiny bit more open, but even there you need to join a channel to read it and you can get kicked out. For reading the logs a bot saved away you might need an account too (but that’s up to the server admin or whoever is hosting that content).
Issue with what you are saying is that I have seen a crap ton of software ( Foss software too ) using discord forums / discord I’m general as their “knowledge base” making it quite hard to find solutions for problems or ask questions, where in the past you’d be using a forum for.
Forums in the past always needed an account (with its own registration, accepting rules and so on) before you could ask your question. Hell, a lot of forums barely showed anything besides 2-3 topics and you needed to be logged in to see all areas (sometimes with extra user roles if you wanted to see more).
Exactly, you needed an account to ask and to view some download links, but google never took me to a forum that needed an account just to read my issue.
Duh, because Google wouldn’t index forums where you need an account to read the posts. I’ve been signed up to dozens of forums back in the day, I’m telling you, a lot of them didn’t show shit until you signed in. Google only shows you public posts, if the game forum needs an account you won’t find the post in your search.
Most forums back then were heavily locked down, especially due to bots spamming ads.