Hadis
Thread Starter
Why does this whole site look like a forum from 2010?
This site is styled after Kaskus — one of Indonesia's oldest and biggest online forums, launched in 1999. Before social media, Kaskus was where a huge chunk of the Indonesian internet lived: buying and selling in its own marketplace ("Forum Jual Beli"), swapping stories, and building a whole vocabulary that's still used online in Indonesia today.
The look this site borrows from that era:
- a dark navy header bar with an orange accent
- a plain table-based thread list, because tables were how pages got laid out before CSS grid existed
- a "postbit" — avatar, username, and a member level stacked in a box beside every post
- reputation shown as coloured icons: a green cendol (literally "iced sweet drink" — a reward) and a red bata ("brick" — a penalty)
- forum-speak like "TS" (thread starter), "gan"/"agan" (short for juragan, "boss" — a friendly way to address another user), and "sundul" (bumping a thread back to the top)
It's a genuine forgotten-web look, just not one of the usual Western examples (GeoCities, brutalism, teletext) — this is the forum web a lot of Indonesian internet users, myself included, actually grew up on.