WEB Forums vs Classic BBS (or the Dark Ages of Forums)

First I'll get a rant off my chest: Why are web forums so archaic when compared to a good old Bulletin Board Systems Software?

On my Pcboard Bulletin Board systems we had forums, private areas, gaming areas, etc.

My rant is about returning to a site where you left off and the site knowing about which areas you are interested in, unread messages, and so forth.

For instance when I logon to the site I have no idea of which of the areas have new messages or threaded messages.

The normal answer is that web sites are asynchronous objects while a bulletin board was synchronous.

Similarities: logon (so the user can configure username and the site can save users information.  Members can be configured to get special area access while non-members cannot.

host machine (server) maintains records of users selected areas and last read messages pointer.

Major differences: bbs: 1 -1 software/user ratio webserver: 1 to many.

Could not this 1 to many ratio not be offset by using a cookie on the clients macihne and the server recieving this clients token querying its database and retrieving the last read message pointers this way when one logs into a site and is presented with the index.htm the user could be presented with a list of subscribed areas and a notification of the # of new messages/threads in that area?

As it stands today when I log into a website running a forum software I have to try and remember where I was the last time I had logged in.  I can't selectively ignore a specific user.. Say for instance, W3BBO (just using you as an example, no slight intended or implied) and I have a beef or IMHO he's an idiot and I want to just ignore that user (both online prescense and messages or threads started by that user)  with the bbs software this was included, web based it is not usually a function provided.

Biggest difference was BBS software was text based and the user was generally led through a series of configureable by sysop menu system where web based the option exists for the user to jump around and bypass menus by manually going to a specific url.

Are we held up because of a scaling issue here?  My BBS was limited to the # of phone lines and modems I could afford and I maxed out to approx 150 users at a time could be logged in. Each node only needed roughly the speed of a 8mhz PC XT to run the bbs software and handle the client requests but the database machine had to be a lot beefier and have FAST hard drives.  If I wanted I could run many virtual clients on my 386/486 machines using desqview (pre Windows era).

Today with much faster machines, connectivity, and other advances in technology I'm finding that as a user we are in the Vic20 dark ages of forum software.