Our linguistics forum has been a nice thing ever since it had been conceived 20 years ago. for most of those 20 years I had been obsessed with the idea that it had to grow constantly in order not to perish, but that's rubbish. We have a small group of regulars, and we have a constant ebb and flow of students who need help for a few weeks and then disappear, and it works nicely. Just recently we were approached by a students' organization who didn't want to open their own new forum but rather have a dedicated corner in ours, with a separate member group and forum category, but as part of the whole.
We are completely funded by private "sponsors" and are thus 100% free of ads and such things. I want to believe that that is part of our appeal for some people. Furthermore, I think that specialized forums are still attractive to those who do not want to join big social media sites where one has no control over what they do with one's data.
Where else people go to ask a question then ?
That's a very slow death, then. Maybe they're not growing that rapidly, but with the right niche / topic, they still thrive. I've kept hearing people say that forums are getting obsolete for more than 12 years now, and yet here we are.
I see a thread like this every other week on every admin forum I go on.
The main difference between now and 2007 where you could casually toss up a forum and get a truckload of traffic is that you have to work a lot harder to get users than you might have had to before, users have standards now and these standards are set by giants they engage with every-day like Facebook and Twitter.
And appearance doesn't really matter, I've seen some absolutely hideous sites which just grew like crazy and gorgeous themes which people didn't give a second glance. Users don't really care about appearance, they do to some extent, but it's secondary to their goals when they visit your site.
The people who really care about the appearance of a site are admins and designers.
What does matter is a real reason to use the site.
Content. Community. Perhaps, linking in one of your other sites / projects to pull a few more people in.
(2018-08-18, 10:09 AM)Azah Wrote: [ -> ]I see a thread like this every other week on every admin forum I go on.
I think it's important to remember that the original poster of this topic not only no longer frequents this forum, he has not once had a successful forum.
This thread was created out of OP's frustration at this, wondering if he should just give up.
Quote:disabling JavaScript is a total edge case. Fullstop. Normal users do not do this.
I've been on a mega big board where people disable JS left and right, simply so they don't have to deal with malware ads on mobile.
These are nasty malware ads which immediately redirect you off the page and off to another site.
No one leaves as otherwise they won't be able to read their favourite content anymore.
And competitors pop-up but the site has enough critical mass and brand loyalty that no one wants to jump ship.
Three years ago, maybe a bit more, they were running MyBB before quickly hitting the limits of it's scalability. And people say forums are dead lol
They apparently started on like $5/month hosting, according to an admin and jumped up and up.
Additionally, some adblockers goes crazy on some sites and kills off all scripts when they see the words "ad" or "advertisement". Some big boards have big notices asking people to disable their adblockers because they were sick of people complaining to them about their site not working due to some ****ed up adblocker.
And some people just hate trackers or don't trust that you won't put a virus on their computer.
Quote:I think it's important to remember that the original poster of this topic not only no longer frequents this forum, he has not once had a successful forum.
This thread was created out of OP's frustration at this, wondering if he should just give up.
Probably, a lot of people think it'll be easy and that they just sit back and watch people roll in.
Looks like all the big boards are now just getting slower and the spark for forums, in general, is dying out...
There's like 5 other members online with me right now
Everyone's been anticipating 2.0 for too long
Hardly any new themes/plugins from independent devs (mostly all paid stuff now)
it would be really sad to see the MyBB project fade off. I've been following it for a long time now
I'd love to see more admins starting forums and more people communicating on these types of platforms. Facebook n twitter is just not for me... neither is reddit. What's your opinion on the way forums are going?
Look at platforms like StackOverflow. They are actually forums. If you have the right software and motivation, community contribution is still a gold mine.
(2018-09-27, 04:31 AM)meetdilip Wrote: [ -> ]Look at platforms like StackOverflow. They are actually forums. If you have the right software and motivation, community contribution is still a gold mine.
Yeh, but it's not secret that forums in global are dying and there is lower number of forum owners and admins than there was few years back...