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Do you still create forums ?
I know the irony of asking this question on a forum, but would love to get your feedback.
Would you create a new forum for your niche? I mean a new forum from scratch, or do you believe they are a thing of the past because of social media or other reasons?
Are forums still relevants?
- Would you create a new one?81 votes
- Yes43.21%
- No45.68%
- Depends (please provide an example)11.11%
Comments
yes. but i do not create fake accounts and plagiarize posts from the internet and then attempt to sell it at a premium.
That’s oddly specific
Someone tried selling their forum here recently - but they'd inflated their user count by dumping public profiles from here into their database.
They tried claiming this was "for attribution" of quotes but of course that was total bullshit.
Depends. Forums are simply a medium to stimulate discussion and content generation. You can create community and discussion through various mediums such as Facebook Groups, Whatsapp Channels, hashnode, substack, and other various cloud-based or self-hosted solutions.
Personally for me, the forums experience (like vanilla) really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. A fast interactive experience might suggest someone build their community on discord. If your community already generates their own content (like LET does here) that might be useful as another user-engagement/acquisition method (e.g., Google Indexing) then a forum solution would be a better medium. Again, it really depends on what kind of an experience you're trying to build.
In my opinion, the primary reason LET has been sustained for so long still is the inter-personal connections and discussions that are generated. I don't think the content posted on LEB sparks discussion on LET (unless it's "drama") and rather the established userbase and connections within it are what's actually valuable, and a forum structure like this fosters those connections.
no, forum is not a good modern business. at least for me.
Its extremely hard to run a successful forum now.
Its better to put your time and effort on a blog instead.
I know lol
You don't run a forum to make money.
All of the normie discussions moved to unindexable crap like facebook groups, reddits, discords, telegrams. Use cases for forums nowadays are limited to objectionable, advertiser-unfriendly content like piracy, adult content, hacking, conspiracy theories etc. - these kinds of forums thrive, the rest - not so much.
I still can't believe he was trying to sell it for more than 5k.
Also it's kind of disappointing because I think he got screwed by everyone who he bought forums from. He's definitely overpaid on assets and content. After merging everything together it just isn't worth the price he was asking for.
what blog is trending right now ?
Nowadays people create Discord or WeChat group instead of forum.
Dev.to, Substack, Hashnode, Medium, are all avenues where people "build blogs" and generate content to then send to their userbase. Some use similar products to create mailing lists (e.g., Ghost or SubStack), which is basically another form of a blog. Morning Brew (non-ref link) is one pretty big one that used this avenue to grow aggressively.
For me, dependes by uses cases...I see a lot of forum survivor because content are updated and talk specific argument.
Start from beginining...sincerily I don't know!
They're thing of the past because big media said so. But in real life they (forums) solve very big problems that tickets / chats can't solve for long-term run community.
That's why I think forum is a must, and they will return back again to scene after chats.
Maybe modern forums, not classic xenforo / ipb.
Big media = discord & microsoft. Who did massive campaign against forums overall.
But in result they implement & monopolize whole market by their discord product integrated forums inside chat application with voice messages.
Discord sucks. Discord = spam network. Discord usually and almost always in my personal experience used against me and my hobby projects by toxic kids / hackers / competitors who did massive spam over all members in discord channel. That the thing, and reported earlier. As far as I know only after 4 years+ discord confirm that, when they personally affected and it was not private thing anymore. And tried to close it. But i did not track when exactly they did some announces about hiding users list or some restrictions related to that.
Since when xenforo and ipb is classic forums? They are standard forum software. Other variations are niche. Usually not created for hyper massive communities.
Forums will never dissapear. When quick and mindless consumption era will once again sucumb, forums will rise. Look at facebook, pinterest, twitter. Dying platforms, corrupted and being replaced by discord, tiktok, mastodon etc.
Those will die as well. Forums will rise!
I have been an active forum user and developer for about 10 years or more.
I am not a user as a visitor to the forums. I made communities using forums to solve problems and build communities around my hobby projects (there were many and very different that i've grow up in past decade).
I saw how the forums developed, grow, and who killed them.
Forums have been killed and looted by the commercial corporation Microsoft.
They are very good at media and public opinion. Microsoft developed a plan and executed it and completely took hostage and centralized decentralized atomic private closed communities from all over the world on microsoft platform.
Microsoft has completely absorbed dozens of millions of users and is milking them to the last penny. I don't see any chance to bring the forums back to the users. All future forums will within the platform of some very rich corporation on its servers and as a paid service. Like discord right now doing.
And this is very bad.
2016 - started agressive campaign against forums.
Talking heads, youtubers, opinion makers & luck of forum features and greed force forum owners move to free discord like communities.
2017 - final attempt to force people stay on forums (new major releases over all biggest forum devs).
2018 - more and more forum users move from forums to discord
2019 - forums more dead than alive
2020 - people in masses understand that discord can't help them for solving their problems. That's how chat widgets / support tickets software and services starts to grow.
2021 - greed of support tickets software - grow. People searching for another solutions
2022 - people need forums inside discord.
2023 - discord now has forums built-in.
2024 - pain, suffer, death.
There's Reddit, also Discord. Telegram also recently announced category feature for the channels, so no. No forum installed.
If I had to choose one, it would be between Flarum or Discourse, but it's not worth to do it if you'd ask me today.
I still use forum (this one is an example and ... it's slow )
If you looking for another alternatives to VBB or Xenforo, some shining stars:
Flarum is good for modern forum written in Php
asmBB is fast and simple forum written in Assembly
forums/bbs/bb is quite out of date now. the ones that are still viable are existing communities...
discord is for the younger generations.
This forum works, and its average age is above high school I think.
As a 20-23 year old I like LET more in a forum way than discord.
Hey now I am only free and a half years
You are Free? 🤔
Yeape the Yeti love is always free.
Fact, nepal has a yeti helpline, you can try that too
Fact, One of the plan from yeti crashed few days ago and all people died
What did it really?
Yeah it did, wasn't my clan though. Those Yeti's are some weirdos.
What a sad news 😐