I'm with GC on this one; it's not our job to promote the forums. Hell, to me, General Discussion isn't even really part of the DF forums. The mores of DF define the GD crowd, somewhat. But I feel little to no connection to the upper boards from down here in GD, or OG. Others have said as much before too.
So while I guess I appreciate the brainstorming, to me there are 1.4 zillion threads here with dozens of posts daily I don't read, and probably never will. There is a buzz of activity around here, all the time.
Let me put my experience in to perspective, and give you my post mortem of watching a simple forum grow enormous then, over the years, collapse in on itself like a neutron star:
My first real forum after the bulletin board system days was a forum based around Everquest, specifically aimed at players of the Rogue class. This was back before wikis and online game resource pages really took off. A time when people had to talk to each other, network, problem solve, compare notes, blah blah blah, to learn what they needed to know and do what they wanted to do. This was around 2000.
I loved the forum and community so much, and posted there so much, I eventually became a volunteer member of the staff. We were big, then. Thousands of daily visits, mentions and recognition from Sony Online Entertainment, invites to conferences, betas, previews, the whole 9 yards. Developers posted there, the biggest names in Everquest argued and boasted and what not on our forums.
Then shit changed. Everquest was knocked off its perch by WoW. Staff left for their own reasons. Online resources became a thing and people had less and less reason to socialize via the boards.
Eventually I too quit EQ and migrated over to the General Discussion forums more than the game forums. The forum tried to rebrand itself as a place for all things Rogue in games, from Assassin's Creed to the MMO flavor of the month. Had a web page for reviews and web content that only me and a couple other people uploaded to. (It's why I still write big massive fuck off game reviews and break downs and updates in OG; because it's what I used to do at this other forum for kicks.) The move ultimately didn't work.
But still, I posted there in GD happily for another solid 3 or 4 years. (Sorta the same shit really as here. Politics threads, culture threads, video game threads, "daily threads", all crammed in to one forum. My personal favorite part of the forum was the "Rant Hall." Go figure.)
Then one by one the remaining admins petered off to do their own things. As a staff we stopped organizing, stopped planning, stopped really caring other than responding to the odd flare up or bot attack. Daily visits went down so far we moved to a cheaper (and shittier!) host. It was no longer worth the admin's time to spend hundreds of dollars every month to host the forums, so we started seeking donations from users. It was usually enough to keep us going a year, with some additional cash thrown in by staff, but quality kept going down. Forum software migrations and lost user accounts caused some users to never return.
Then pretty much the last active staff besides me and one other guy left, and we changed hosts again. Many of the regulars in General Discussion moved on, away, grew up, went to college, got married. One notable one in my memory even died. (*Pours one out for Kroe*) We're seriously talking about 17 years of forum history now.
Now....the site is still there, still gets paid for. Has possibly the world's shittiest host. New posts get made in GD.....maybe once every other couple weeks. And that's the most active forum of the group I still bother to check for new posts in. I sort of expect every year for someone to finally declare the forum is truly dead. Most of the remaining users have said as much. We keep the forums up for nostalgia's sake, pretty much.
I guess my point is....given a long enough timeline, everything's odds of survival reaches zero. DF has been going, what, 14 years now? That's impressive time span for any online community. Shit, multi-million dollar game communities have lasted a fraction of the time. I've seen how far decay can go in a once thriving internet community, and personally, DF ain't anywhere there yet. If it's one thing it has that many other forums don't, is a constant influx of new, intelligent, young, energetic people who can quickly blend in to the masses. This forum can be insular, but not so insular that we see a new name we don't recognize and go "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU INTERLOPER?!?!!?"
Another thing in the forum's favor is that it owes its existence to something that isn't going anywhere. DF will be made until Toady dies, and probably in some capacity afterward. Unlike my first real forum, which was based around ultimately transient games that came and went as the tech improved or players got bored......DF is in the museum of modern art. IT IS ETERNAL. And so the forums will always have a firm basis for activity. As long as there is a DF to talk about, then people are eventually going to want to talk about something else while still being within DF's sphere. The tree of the forum is watered with the blood of new posters, and DF is the sword.
TLDR: Could be worse.
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Topic: The future of the Bay12 forums (Read 19633 times)