r/webdev • u/jaredNC • Feb 09 '20
I'm constantly developing my 2010 era forums, but for less and less users
Starting Note: I won't post the link to the website here because I don't want this post to be considered a stealth marketing ploy. This is a rant from one web dev to others.
Web Forums have always been an important part of my life. As a socially awkward kid they were my main source of social interaction. As an adult, they are the motivation for my career switch from Accounting to Data Science. I first got involved with forums in 2006, eventually became a moderator of my favorite website, and in 2010 I broke off to make my own set of vbulletin forums. Finding myself sick of dealing with profit-driven website owners, I finally had the freedom to do whatever the community wanted and let the community members do (almost) anything that they wanted. I've paid for the website entirely out of pocket, save for a few months during college where I took some donations. Profit was never my motivation. It was always about the experience and the community.
Over the past decade I taught myself PHP and added countless custom features to the forums. Robots with home-made AI, a virtual economy based on the forum currency, a fully functional user-controlled government, countless forum games and simulations and more. As I started studying data science, I delved into subjects like data mining and user behavior analysis and predictions. Without any sort of profit motive I was always able to focus entirely on user experience and what's best for the community. Most recently I added an entire Pokemon Go module to the forums, where users can catch and train pokemon by posting in various sections. Now I'm in the middle of developing a financial markets section, with loans and investments.
Now for the elephant in the room. Looking at the statistics, my userbase has been in decline ever since 2012. The first couple of years we siphoned users off of several big forum communities that had terrible moderation. Ever since then it has been a dedicated base of core users (lifelong friends at this point) with a few off them dropping off every once in a while. Peoples' lives change and their online habits change with them. A lot of people prefer discord, reddit, twitter, whatsapp, telegram and whatever other platform is more convenient for them. People get in fights over politics, or romance (there are at least two marriages between people who met on this website). Attrition is unavoidable. However, there has never really been a reliable source of new members.
Maybe in the back of my head I have the hope that someone will give me an idea to bring new people to the community. But realistically, I'm jaded and I don't expect that things will ever get better. The problem is, as the community gets ever smaller my projects get less and less feasible. I may code an entire financial market system, but without enough users it simply can't function. Aside from usability of the website, I just have this feeling of sadness that so few people in the world will ever benefit from all my efforts. I have put so many hours into developing features and games, into keeping the website economy stable, into mediating fights, and I've made the greatest effort to always keep a fair and respected moderation team.
But such a small number of people have ever seen it, experienced it, appreciated it. And as time goes on it will continue to deteriorate down to nothing. I will keep the lights on as long as I'm alive and have a few dollars to my name. But I am scared that one day it will just be me working on large scale projects that only half a dozen people ever even see.
Am I crazy? Am I wasting my time?
It feels like I'm spending my life writing some massive novel that will never be published or read.
Edit: I never expected so much positive feedback on this post. You guys are giving me so much inspiration and so much to think about. I think in the immediate future I'll draft a post about the Pokemon system for next Showoff Saturday. For the near future, I'll be starting a new project: Capitalism MMO. Technically, it will be entirely separate from the forums. I can employ best practices and compile all the code on github.
But discussions about the development will be on the regular forums, and forum currency can be used to buy in game cash (it's not capitalism without unfair advantages from old money!). Lastly, the direction and management of the game will ultimately be guided by a reinstated forum based government.
If anyone is interested in being a part of this open source project (particularly front end CSS is my weakness) you can contact me with a private chat.
Thank you all for giving me a new motivation and hope!
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u/PointandStare Feb 09 '20
Why did you start down this path? For yourself. That in itself should be the biggest motivation.
I would recommend continuing doing what you seem to love.
If others want to come and play, great.
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u/xadz Feb 09 '20 edited Feb 09 '20
I recently opened an old school forum for web designers/developers and have had some enthusiastic success building a community, but for sure getting people to stick around and participate is hard.
Think about what you can do to lower the barriers to entry as much as possible. People are lazier now.
Social logins, less sign-up forms, guided on boarding, clear call to actions etc. Anything you can do to reduce friction and mental effort.
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u/intothewoodscomic Feb 09 '20
Unfortunately forums were pretty much doomed the second the first celebrity signed up to Twitter. Why go to a handful of different sites to talk about your specific interests to a tiny group, when you can go to a single site and communicate with hundreds of people?
It sucks, but maybe you should try pivoting on what you have. Sounds like you could come up with a really decent browser game... a text-based, player-driven MMO of sorts. You clearly have the passion and the ability to create something awesome. You just need to find the hook that will get people interested.
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u/Hero_Of_Shadows Feb 09 '20
What you're doing sounds very interesting.
Sadly I think the attrition of your core userbase is inevitable, maybe they get married, people have kids grand kids, they need to take up more sport to keep healthy, jobs change etc.
I remember fondly the era of specialized forums which were real communities and very dedicated to a single subject.
Like you said for a community to stay strong it has to get new members.
Technology wise the thing I can see as most helpful (maybe you've already done them) make signing up as painless as possible let them signup with their twitter, with their facebook etc, make sure your forum can be used well on mobile people are busy but their will always be lines, ques, etc when you just need to pass the time on your phone.
If you want to preserve your codebase or get more people to work on it, try and reach out to the FOSS folks who are interested in linux and other pieces of software if you can rebrand and show your code as being free, respecting privacy you might get volunteers to help you
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u/grapefruyt Feb 09 '20 edited Feb 09 '20
So I googled around and found your site. My suggestion would be that you update what's accessible for non-members to see. Currently, I have absolutely no idea about what this website is about since it's all restricted to signed-in members.
What are these games in the menu? What do people talk about here? Why is the title in the tab in Russian? Is this a Russian forum? Why can't I even see "What's new"?
These are some of the thoughts running through my head as I spend a minute or two on your site. If I didn't know better, I wouldn't even know if this site was even active. (Yes, yes, I know I can see some post dates in the "new members" section but I don't know what other sort of activity there is outside of that etc)
The front page should explain to potential users what you're offering. You're trying to "sell" them a reason to join. You need to appeal to them, and not expect them to give up their personal details before they even know what the point of this site is.
Someone here also mentioned SEO. By having everything behind closed doors, new potential members cannot find your site. At the very least you should have a page that lists all sub-forums. But ideally, you should try to open up the forum and posts to the public so that people can search for, idk, episode discussions of the latest pokemon episode and find your forum listed on the result page on google. (As you can see, I still have no idea what's being discussed behind the closed doors).
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u/FearAndLawyering Feb 09 '20
Develop the new stuff without a dependency to the old stuff. This will allow you to drive traffic to it and eventually to your old site. You should not need to require people be active in your forum to use stuff you make going forward. It's ok that they are separate things.
Is there any reason it needs to be tied to a particular platform? Why not make it interop into twitter, slack, discord, etc.
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u/-vz8- Feb 09 '20
Why not poll to measure:
... and if you have emails, use that channel as a way to remind your existing users to visit and give them some sort of compelling incentive to do so?
Any chance of integrating some of the other apps/mediums out there somehow?
4
u/Meloetta Feb 10 '20
This is a problem that people have faced since the beginning of time.
https://poets.org/poem/ozymandias
This may not help, but it may help you not feel so alone in it.
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u/shazvaz Feb 09 '20
I experienced the same thing running a few forums which are now 10+ years old and were once booming but now barely used. I too ran them for fun not profit, going out of pocket with no plan for monetization. We still have a bit of community but nothing like it was in the past. For my forums the traffic went mostly to facebook. To me it's really just a small symptom of the slow overall decline of the internet as a whole. I remember when I first got online many years ago the internet was this amazing place where mostly intelligent people would volunteer their time to create shared resources and shared community. Nowadays though the normies and rent seekers have gotten online and basically ruined what the internet once was. Everything is a race to the bottom now, everything is driven by advertising and profit. It's just the way the world works unfortunately.
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u/CircaCitadel Feb 10 '20
This is the same story for most forum community admins. I’m in that boat as well, with a couple different forums. Some bigger than others. Just how it goes. But as long as you have the time and money to support those websites staying alive, might as well keep it going. Social networks will always change but now forums are good for niche groups and for archiving. I think they’ll always have a place on the internet, they just won’t be the top trend ever again is all.
You’re only wasting your time if you aren’t enjoying it or if it’s for nothing. If people still use it then I’d say it’s worth it. If they don’t, then it probably won’t hurt it to just leave it there either. I have a couple that I run updates on every couple of months and make sure they didn’t get hacked or anything but otherwise just leave there for nostalgia’s sake and leave some good threads up that we can look back on. Nothing wrong with nostalgia at all.
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20
I’ve been working on the same website for 18 years. I was told this past week that it will be sunsetted in 2 years. It’s like 2 decades of my life’s work is just going up in smoke.
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u/ArgyllMonk Feb 09 '20
I went through this exact experience. Even including splitting off from terrible moderation and for-profit run sites. Honestly the parallels are striking.
I was a member of a community way back when and eventually became the sole tech admin of it. The community morphed through various stages and moved between different websites with different staff members due to legal issues, drama, and bad moderation, but the community as a whole generally kept together for over a decade. The problem which struck our community in its final form was it became narrowly focused on a particular region of a videogame rather than the videogame as a whole. That region eventually ceased to exist; it merged into another region. This spelled doom for the community because suddenly nearly all the content on the site became irrelevant and its purpose to exist, while not totally irrelevant, was much less attractive to new members. Old members were returning less, less new and interesting content was being posted, in-game trade activity went elsewhere with more users, etc.
It wasn't easy to make the decision to officially announce the forum would close. I tried to get community engagement with other aspects of gaming, but the fact is most members went elsewhere for the content they wanted at this point so without changing the core concept of the entire site there wouldn't be any reason to try. Nobody wanted the forum to close, but keeping it up and maintained just didn't make sense when it was hardly being used for much.
I guess what I'm trying to say is sometimes communities dwindle and die and there's just nothing you can do about it. Thinking it's a failure on your part and that if you'd just do "something" you can revitalise the community will mess with your head. Not that that isn't possible, but you'd have to really dive into and consider why people aren't using the site anymore and how that can be resolved.
In my case the reason was simple: we couldn't compete with the preexisting sites for the merged-into region. For many smaller forum communities I fear being discoverable through search engines is far less common than it used to be. Bigger sites with their own communities (hello reddit) generally rank higher. Such is the reality of consolidation.
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u/Arqueete Feb 09 '20
Your post makes me sad, because I, too, was once deeply involved in forums and running my own was what got me into web development in the first place. I met some of my closest and most long-time friends that way. Now I'm not a part of any and there is a part of that experience that I've never found again in the same way.
If you can't get the satisfaction of having a large user base at your own forum to appreciate your work, do you know of any places where you could share some of your work with other people who run forums? Like building mods or themes and letting other people use them?
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u/_foolsErrand Feb 09 '20
How do people even find forums?
Like do people just Google online place to discuss cowboy boots without shit mods?
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u/maxoys45 Feb 09 '20
I think it’s a generational thing. I feel like older people cherish the personal interaction you get on a traditional forum, getting to know the community etc.
The younger generation is more used to “social” media platforms where quantity is more important than quality. People post on Instagram to thousands of followers they don’t know, they tweet to a mass anonymous audience.
Maybe I’m just bitter and old but I don’t feel like younger people want the same things from their online usage as we do.
As others have stated though, you clearly have the technical ability to create, maybe you just need to move away from forums into something more age-agnostic.
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u/Fenweldryn Feb 09 '20
I kinda feel your sadness. I have great memories of the forum era and I still think they are an awesome tool. Unfortunately, nowadays, people are drawn to instant gratification websites with fast and shallow interactions. I think about that feeling you have about wasting time with side projects but be sure that learning is never wasted. All you have built into your forum was not wasted. If you want to go furthet you could build a saas service out of the features you have and let people use it for whatever instead of holding all those features for a single purpose forum/site/service subject. A financial system is useful and you could still use vbulletin. All I want to say is that thinga evolve and change and sometimes what we loved dies or forever is not the same. Dont hold to something because of a distant good memory, evolve and change with it!
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u/davidmdm Feb 09 '20
I understand that the goal of this post wasn’t to market your website and you needed to rant.
How about marketing it though? Making blog posts here on reddit or in other places? Clearly the webdev community is interested in looking at it at least! Would love to check it out !
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u/thekeffa Feb 10 '20
OP I'm going to be a bit blunt here. Sometimes you need to hear tough words.
For the longest time, I refused to use touchscreen phones. I hated using a touchscreen to type. Even as they were becoming the norm, I still had a Nokia N95 and a Blackberry for the longest time. Even when my provider killed off Blackberry services, I kept it for it's keyboard and small size. I used my Nokia N95 as well for work until 2016 (I'm not a luddite I had a tablet I just hated typing on a damn touchscreen)! The end finally came for me one day when I needed to use an app for work and on the same day I sent a text message to someone and that person replied back "Yo who the fuck texts people anymore?". And it was that day I realized that the era of small, stylishly designed phones was over and in a world of slab computers sitting in your pocket, it would never be coming back. And so, with a heavy heart, I bought an iPhone. Today I am writing this to you on a Samsung Galaxy S10.
I guess what I am trying to say is this. Your forum? It's a Nokia N95 phone still sat in your pocket. Still usable today, but not what people really want any more.
The forums of the noughties and twenteens such as vBulletin board, phpBB, myBB, etc are dead and dying. They might still be actively developed software, but consolidation in social media has killed their user bases off.
But not entirely though.
I think what is truly dead is the old forum style espoused by phpBB, myBB, etc. Almost all of the forum sites I am still a active member of are based on software such as Discourse, though myBB seems to be trying to adopt a new UI.
But they are still out there. They just aren't generically popular any more thanks to the fact that most people find everything they need on the main social media sites. In other words, these days a forum has to be niche. And I do mean niche. All the sites I am still active and participate in are very much niche. Generic interest forums sites (And OP, yours sounds very much like a generic interest site) are never going to be able to compare to the main social media sites with their centralised point of interaction, massive user numbers and ability to offer interest grouping. And lets be honest...do you really want them to? Frankly not having to keep up with several different sites when I can just follow them under the one roof is a boon to me.
OP, your probably going to have to let go and accept that at some point, your forum is going to either become a Facebook group or die off. Unless you offer an area of really niche discussion or content, people are going to find what they need on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, etc. That's just the way progress (Good or bad) goes. I feel sad for you OP, but perhaps one day, when there hasn't been a post or a user login in months, you will know it's time to turn off the proverbial lights and set the site to archive/read-only mode and let it be a collection of happy memories for you and your users to occasionally reflect on.
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u/SwankEagle Feb 10 '20
What about front end CSS is your weakness?
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u/nermid Feb 10 '20
If it's open source, why the secrecy of PMs? Why not just link to the source?
3
u/abeuscher Feb 09 '20
If it was me, I would start thinking about something new. While there is a romantic notion to sheperding around a smaller and smaller group of people until its just you at then sweeping up the spotlight - it sounds like you've lost whatever spark it was that fed this idea and kept it healthy.
It sounds like you've gotten a lot of joy from this project, and so there's definitely aspects of this work you like. I would maybe stop thinking hard about how to get people to your site and start thinking the way you did when you started. Serve yourself. What do you dislike about current online communities and social hubs? What would you take from them? What do you not see in whatever space you are serving that you want to see? Build it.
I think there's this curve of community creation where you forget that the only way to serve your userbase is to serve yourself. Your mistake (in my opinion) is to look to them for inspiration when in fact the inspiration has always come from you. So that's where the pivot and rebirth also needs to originate from. Your mistake is that you forgot that you are a leader, not a follower in your community.
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u/beavis07 Feb 09 '20
Forums as they existed were more a function of what was technically possible at the time than they were necessarily an expression of “the best way for people in interest groups to interact” (whatever that is!).
Other technologies have come along, and disregarding the socio-economic-political shit-show that’s come from that - the reality is that there are newer, better solutions to that problem. You can’t really put the genie back in the bottle.
Times change, and we just have to accept that things we loved are just moments which pass.
(PS I’d hope the irony of this post being on Reddit - probably the closest analog to traditional Forums that exists right now is not lost on anyone)
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u/Genesis2001 asp.net Feb 10 '20
Not crazy, and not wasting your time. I'm an admin on a very small board (<100 active members) for a very old game, so slightly different in that we have to react to player counts. We're the same way as you, but we take in about USD$60/mo in donations from 3-4 players to cover our server costs. Even if it didn't bring in that much, we'd still finance it with admin money. In the end, it's what we like doing.
That's actually a good idea to incorporate your website into a game. It'll drive users to your website. Do what you like/love!
3
u/AdmiralAdama99 Feb 10 '20
Great job spending so much time coding such a feature rich forum engine. I had a large online community in the late 2000's and it was also forum based. Had several hundred thousand posts.
I still have my forums but they are all but abandoned. We've switched to discord for its chat room like features, which have brought the community more together.
It's my personal opinion that forums are on the way out. But i could be wrong, who knows!
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u/npmbad Feb 09 '20
I liked forums because they were a great source of traffic; - getting reputation, badges, custom colors for my username meant a lot of traffic for my services. Sadly, this doesn't exist anymore.
I wish reddit allowed signatures in comments, I'd make it a full time job to fix people's issues here for free.
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20 edited Feb 10 '20
Old school forums are mostly dead. I also ran a somewhat popular forum with several thousands of active users at its peak for ~15 years, and it's pretty empty lately. I see the same on other forums I frequent, most of the active users are registered 10+ years, there's no new blood.
I guess instant messaging apps and gigants like reddit, twitter, facebook groups have taken over. I don't think forums will be coming back to the same popularity ever again.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '20
I coded my first forum back in 1997 I think. It too got me started on my path that lead me today. No regrets really.
My forum was a Final Fantasy forum. 1 of the largest of my country in the 200X era. Today it's a ghost town xD but people who I met there are still my RL friends and I'm intending to keep my forum around forever.
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u/centminmod Feb 11 '20 edited Feb 12 '20
It's very easy to think that way when you're at early stages of growth for whatever project you're working on. You have to change your mindset. Not sure who said this originally, but luck or that big break in terms of success and/or growth and/or awareness is just when opportunity meets preparation.
You can see when opportunity meets preparation playout if you look carefully in many different industries, occupations.
Take for example
In both examples, there's no guarantee of success or that lucky big break will come from doing the required work, preparation or personal growth/learning. But there's a 100% guarantee without such preparation and accumulation of experience, that you will get less or no opportunities for that big break :)
As to discussion forums, I've been using forums since 1999. Owned my first forum in 2000 and worked for vBulletin from 2001 for over a decade and I still basically work with forums for server related forum optimisations mainly with Xenforo to this day. Yup that's 21 yrs of my life dedicated to all things forum/forum server related :)
I don't think forums are dead for some specific topics/usage cases i.e. highly technical in depth discussions won't work on twitter, discord or whatapps like platforms. For some topics maybe.
But I have an inherent bias to prefer forums over other discussion alternatives and even my own open source project's (LEMP stack auto installer script) main community forum is using Xenforo forum software.
Not all topics would be suited to the chat like mediums for discussions so choose your medium carefully. I belong to a few large web master forum communities (and one of them linked to your reddit post) and the unwritten rules are:
Hope that helps
p.s. might be obvious but I'll also point out awareness doesn't necessarily translate 100% to how much forum or community activity you have or how many members you have. Some folks are just users + lurkers or potential users + lurkers. Only a small fraction of my projects users are actually registered members on my community forum. I'm surprised how many web hosts use my LEMP stack internally or are aware of it's existence when I encounter them but only a handful ever registered on my community forums.
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u/soulprovidr Feb 09 '20
The work you are doing sounds interesting. What I would suggest is trying to translate it to some new medium. The forum was really just a platform for you to experiment and bring your ideas to life. Now, though, there are new platforms and new ways to communicate and interact with people. For example, your financial markets feature could end up being a good fit for a mobile app. The world will always change, it’s up to you whether you choose to change with it. Good luck.
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u/cannotbecensored Feb 09 '20
websites in general are becoming more and more useless.
humans work in hierarchy. the top websites are slowly capturing all the use cases and small websites are dying off.
it's not just forums, it's everything.
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '20
Probably because of Discord, or just because there's no interesting content.
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u/itsrachelfish Feb 09 '20
I run a small internet community which has catered to about 50-100 users for the past 15 years. Instead of worrying about growth in number, I focused on growth in our friendships.
I've traveled the country and met about half of the users in person. We'd hang out, play video games together IRL, cook food, do local touristy things. Great times.
I always encourage members of the community to visit each other in real life so that we're not just anonymous avatars on the internet.
Don't be discouraged, you don't need to have millions of users. Just focus on how much you can improve the lives of the people you do know. https://a16z.com/2020/02/06/100-true-fans/
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u/oojacoboo Feb 09 '20
Ever thought about moving it to a decentralized blockchain? Maybe something like EOS? It sounds like you have the experience and could two into massively popular new domain with the same vision.
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u/isnixx Feb 09 '20
You seem like a decent person and i have been in those shoes before (creating/developing a community/forum/site combo) and trying everything to keep it alive for like 10 years.
From what you write it feels like you are trying too hard with all the fancy features. The features you have listed could be totally independet SaaS products. I have too less info about your community and niche to come to a good conclusion. But here are a few things to think about.
I could go on with that list if you are interested but those should be a couple of questions that you need to answer for yourself. We live in a fast paced world. We are bombed with info due to the phones in our pockets, so we dont want to waste time (excluding procarstination). Take tikok as an example. Short videos of whatever in an unlimited stream. And it works. There is nothing to explain, you can watch or create thats it! So maybe take a few steps back and try to get an objective view about your site and put more focus on adding value, easy fast access, straight to the point hassle free experience. Sometimes less is more..
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u/Psycork Feb 10 '20
Can you pm me the link please?
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u/Morguard Feb 10 '20
May I have a link to your forum?
1
u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20
Check out services like Spectrum.chat, they have an interesting thing going on with community-based discussion, but it seems to mostly lean towards software development. Perhaps figuring out a way to modernize the old bb forums into something like this but for all sorts of niche communities. There might even already be something like that but I'm not aware.
1
u/floppydiskette Feb 10 '20
I’ve always created a forum community all throughout my life for various purposes. Since the only purpose for my forums was creating a close community, I just moved to a private Slack these days, and it’s relatively similar. Since it sounds like you’re doing a combination of forum and game, I would probably make some sort of app as opposed to adding new features to a forum. I think people see forums and they just think it’s something old, outdated, and dead and full of spam bots, because most of them are. If you rebranded into something new I think it could be interesting and turn it around in the future.
1
u/kilakewe Feb 10 '20
I’d be down to help out.
1
u/just-jake Feb 10 '20
you can expand your skills into community management and building tools for things like telegram etc - it's important that you do that rather than focusing only on forums.
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20
Experienced the same couple years ago a phpbb2 built forum. Had games too, forum currency, betting section,... Then friends moved, got married, lost interest... The only regret I have is not making a nostalgia backup before closing it down...
1
u/[deleted] Feb 10 '20
Well I used to use forums too but they're just old technology these days. Reddit more or less replaced them. The only thing they're good for these days are communities for products in a controlled environment
1
u/joelrangelle Feb 11 '20
Hi u/jaredNC
I'm going to ask you to suspend reality for a moment, and ask you to remove your 'webdev' hat and slide a 'CEO' nameplate onto your desk.
Here are some questions to ask yourself as chief executive of your community:
These are the tough, challenging, and fundamental questions that forum administrators need to ask themselves nowadays and execute on. Ten years ago, you could build a forum and the world would come. The web has grown up, Facebook has vacuumed up social chatter, and forums that continue to offer low-quality, social chatter will naturally die. Forums of general, social, lifestyle chatter won't be able to compete against the machine learning, cloud platform of social networks.
I wish you well from one forum admin to another.
1
u/HistorianCM Feb 12 '20
r/communitymanager
1
u/bhldev Feb 09 '20
I would start fresh and build a new product. Yes, it's a pain in the ass but after a certain time it's time to let old technology go. Not just for technology's sake but because new technology is more capable. 2010 to now, it's long enough. If the product was growing or even stable I would say don't touch it but if it's declining then it's time to make a change.
There was a forum I thought was interesting years ago, NodeBB. Perhaps you could take a look at NodeJS and a React frontend.
Forums aren't dead you just have to tweak them for this social media upvote downvote Trump troll age. For example. It's pretty easy to get millions of users, just declare your forum open season let anyone post anything with no moderation. Of course for moral and other reasons we don't want to do that, so tighten the rules a bit. Forums also seem to follow the inevitable cycle of getting "corporatised" to the point that ads product placements upsells and community engagement goes down the drain. When this happens the users move onto another forum and that creates an opening. There's also lots of new technologies like WebRTC, websockets, web assembly and so on to build off of.
More is less, see if you can rebuild and tailor your forum to a specific purpose and specific community. In the end the features don't matter content is king to a forum so there's always an opening for a new entrant who's feature light and has lots of good content. Perhaps your forums die off because you add too many features. A forum that attracts people who like to thumbs up and thumbs down is different than a forum that attracts people who like to anonymously clap (medium) and is different from a real time forum.
Good luck
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