But lately I've noticed a lack of these forums in search results. It used to be in the good ol' days you would search for a topic and some forum would discuss it at length, with hundreds of comments, and then the topic got locked as the issue was resolved.
I still see forums in search results, but they're mostly old-timer forums which have sufficient funding and a credible userbase, and are staying regardless.
Did social media absorb these forums? Did messenger apps absorb them? Did Discord absorb them? Did Reddit absorb them?
Where's have all the forums gone?
It's part of the relentless push toward greater resource allocation efficiency. Just as it is orders of magnitude more efficient to distribute perishable goods through a centralized corporate supermarket chain rather than a patchwork of independent corner markets, Reddit reduces the total amount of operations overhead that once went in to maintaining thousands of independent vBulletin / phpBB / Discourse instances in the aggregate.
With all the recent talk about supply chain resilience and the inherent trade-offs necessary to improve it, one might wonder whether such considerations might be weighed differently going forward.
Visitor numbers always remained pretty high (People coming to the site to download resources etc.) but people were just less likely to contribute with posts as they had other places to use as a community instead.
Here's the number of posts for each yearly release of the game...
- 2009: 110,000 posts
- 2010: 273,000 posts
- 2011: 280,000 posts
- 2012: 188,000 posts
- 2013: 196,000 posts
- 2014: 180,000 posts
- 2015: 159,000 posts
- 2016: 96,000 posts
- 2017: 50,000 posts
- 2018: 32,000 posts
- 2019: 21,000 posts
- 2020: 24,000 posts
- 2021: 17,000 postsI much preferred those forums to what we have now with social media and places like Reddit. With the forum I knew all the main posters, while now everyone is basically a stranger good for one short conversation.
1) Losing users to social media. Forums were a place to meet people and socialize, now twitter/facebook/instagram fill that niche and do it more expertly.
2) Losing users to chat apps. Forums were a social space for friends once upon a time, now whatsapp/snapchat/discord are where people talk to friends.
3) Aging GUIs. Most forums have outdated GUIs which improperly scale to modern displays. They're either too compact (for an 1024*768 era), or they made a failed attempt at modernization and it looks terrible.
4) Consolidation of forum hosting. Tapatalk bought every popular free forum hosting provider (such as invision) and forced everyone to create a new "tapatalk" account to continue using the existing forums. Then they forced everyone to convert their forum to a new GUI (which was questionable at best). They pestered forum owners to pay up. They pestered forum owners to beg their community for money by adding a donation badge.
5) VPS providers suck now. AWS has drunk their milkshake, they're fighting over scraps that fall from the table. (For those who don't know, VPS means a cloud provider that typically provides a managed PHP environment with a preconfigured PHP app, such as an open-source forum software).
6) Barrier to entry in the modern computing world. You can't just launch a forum provider in 2022, you need to have both an iOS and an Android app, and they need to be as good as Discord. Your forum also needs to load on desktops with varying screen resolutions, from iPads which are essentially retro 800x600 displays, to 4k monitors on laptops and desktops.
You can see how these things all feed into one another. Forum hosting providers were eaten up by the likes of Tapatalk because the margins got so low, only a big fish could capture enough revenue to survive. Open-source projects fell apart because the VPS providers couldn't afford to contribute code to them anymore. People left for apps and social media because forums started to get worse. Etc.
Model shipbuilding: https://modelshipworld.com/
Model engineering: https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/forums/
Woodworking forums: https://www.lumberjocks.com/forums
Metalworking and woodworking: https://www.practicalmachinist.com/forum/
Locks, doors, safes and physical security: https://www.lockpicking101.com/
General IT community: https://community.spiceworks.com/
List of tech forums: https://github.com/learn-anything/forums
One of those that survive, the forum still exists (https://www.sau.com.au/forums/). It's a very specific, niche, technical forum, where owners of Nissan Skylines socialised, asked technical questions and traded.
Facebook Marketplace/eBay etc cannibalised the trading. This meant sponsors of the forum who helped pay the hosting bills slowly reduced.
Social banter moved to Facebook Groups (often more localised geographically... in its heyday in the late 90's and early 2000's the forum had people from all over the world socialising around the clock)
Which means technical Q&A is the main drawcard now, and is the most active component of the forum outside of the diehard "oldschool crew" who keep the social parts active. I expected reddit to cannibalise the technical Q&A, but it hasn't as forums present a combination of threaded conversation and blog style updates from the OP or groups of contributors.
The time that everyone started a forum is gone. Many smaller ones have shut down. But some are still thriving.
Yes to all four.
The classic forum experience (I'm talking phpBB2 and similar) is incompatible with the dynamic UI/UX the modern web audience expects. The lack of comments being formatted as a tree is likely a deal breaker on its own.
Fondly remember when those ad-filled 'free forum hosts' were shunned by anyone serious who would get a domain and private server instead. In some ways it feels like we are potentially back at the same situation but in reverse.
Considering traditional forum software like phpBB, vbulletin and similar largely look and work the same as they did 15 years ago not hard to see why some change is desired particularly with accessibility by mobile-users.
A lot of the remaining forums just don't play well with Reddit/FB. Things like a specific community or game. Things with some quality control (also including Something Awful). Or places like 4chan. Though out of all of these, I'm surprised that 4chan/8chan users have set up a colony on Facebook, but they don't expect to stay there.
I think Discord has some places of interest but there seems to be a very high barrier to joining unknown servers, unlike IRC.
Kinda wish some more went away, I still know where to find some silly comments I made in my youth.
Whirlpool still going strong in aus.
1) Reddit 2) Facebook 3) Discord
Lots of them just disappeared and never 're-appeared' anywhere, as the interest in paying to maintain them just died out.
Personally I prefer reddit to the other 2, as its searchable, but overall the web feels a lot less rich than it did when forums were more popular and niche knowledge seemed more common without onerous reddit/facebook/discord moderating.
'Search' is not so helpful at specifics (topics), one size does NOT fit all, the universe is too big ...
As the years ticked by it became mostly idle with few new users, basically existing solely for the entertainment of a tiny group of long-time members that mostly didn't even possess a zx6e motorcycle anymore.
Between the nonexistent growth and increasingly long in the tooth forum software full of vulnerabilities I didn't really have interest in maintaining, I retired the site.
It wouldn't surprise me if a similar pattern occurred on other sites. Membership and participation diminishes, and it just becomes a pointless burden. I presume social media on smartphones has consumed everyone's attention.
Enhanced editions of these games were released in the 2010s, bringing old and new modders to the fold.
The heyday is long gone but we still get activity daily and new users. Creating a supplemental Discord and a Twitter auto feed for updates or releases of new content were pretty useful at keeping the forums active. The Discord is great for certain types of conversations but it did not replace the forums.
We also upgraded the Invision board software to their cloud version though it’s still Invision at the end of the day and still I find issues that were a problem back in 2009. :) But it works still.
It runs on FlaskBB, which is a (reasonably) modern forum written using the Flask web framework.
You'd be amazed how many automated signups it attracts, for something that doesn't even show up on Google.
People moved off them because it's easy to track people via... DNS stuff.
RIP the days of vBulletin hacktivist collectives. At least towards the end, they had HTTPS: I always found it odd that the IRC people were obsessed with "opsec" while hackers like me always kept it offline, and thus never were even on the feds radar until we'd do something like show up at a BLM protest next to a Catholic school and announce over a bullhorn that we're here from the internet, and we're here to make sure you let the children speak and don't touch them without permission.
(And then smirking at the cops standing with hands on their guns. Yeah, it's me. The guy from Defcon. The one who told your bosses if they're gonna stop having elections, we're gonna stop respecting your privacy.)
But in the meantime the amount of (noise) information and sources people have to keep track of or are distracted by on social media, and now the walled off chaotic pits of discord and slack chats, has been detrimental to all of that. There's just too much and people are too lazy to hold on to one place etc because it's too easy to doomscroll on twitter or shitpost memes all day in chats. Kinda sad but also alot of symptoms of a younger generation that can only deal with their immediate present and has no sense of history and just goes through life like that.
I was very close to using some vBulletin type software, but we went with a platform called Guild which I can recommend.
You have to pay for it, but there are no adverts and it's very smooth.
See related recent discussion earlier this month:
Ask HN: I miss Usenet. Are there any modern equivalents? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31681234
I like textboards for scratching my "misses old style fora" itch.