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[Scoops Novel]

Please describe them a little.

[George_Chickens]

There are very few left. Without the ability to get new blood, partially because most newcomers stick to web chats and social media, most of the great communities of old are dead, or worse than dead; shambling on as a zombie circlejerk with none of the energy it once had.

I like Spacebattles, though. I'm actually not a big scifi fan, it's just fun to see people discussing it for pages and pages. It has a decently active games section, and several thousand registered users online at any given time.

[MrRoboto75]

It's all reddit or discord now.  It sucks.

[KittyTac]

I'd say this is a good one. I mostly lurk (I'm more often on Discord) however. Used to be super active but also a shitter.

I feel forums stopped dying around... mid-2019. Yes many people left but I feel they stopped leaving in such amounts around that time. It's stable now. Not just this forum, most others above a critical mass (e.g MafiaScum).

[Starver]

I've had a couple of good forums quit on me, because the top-level maintainer seems to have stopped paying attention. They had a useful set of mid-level moderators keeping it all going, but something (whether the base iron, the domain renewel, some other subscription element or a vital security patch[1]) rendered them as powerless to resolve as any standard user.

Then there was fora.xkcd.com (fan run, though officially piggy-backing off the original xkcd.com domain) which suffered a data breach a couple of years ago now, and was 'temporarily' offlined "while it was being sorted", though the message to this effect isn't there any more - it seems they let the subdomains and or hosts involved expire. But it was a good place to read, seemingly a good quality userbase and much interesting content. If they've move elsewhere, I haven't seen it yet.

So, first of all, a good forum needs someone who isn't going to abandon it to an unadministratable mess (noting that, awkward hack aside, I can't blame anyone for not being able to put the cat back in the bag and seemingly giving up).

Good forums don't need to be busy (B12 is too busy for me, I can't read everything I later wish I might) but obviously needs to sustain interest.

Good forums should be tolerant of subject-drift (not immediately ban someone for doing so[2]), without there being anarchy.

It helps if there's an on-primary-topic/off-primary-topic delineation, if there's a clear primary topic (which there usually is), like the upper/lower-forums on here; else a secondary 'chat' off each main subject. That's where the pure anarchy gets drip fed into.

....


You know, all the above is nothing (barring the functional continuation bits), without it just being a good group of like-minded members. Not utterly like-minded, but within any reasonable tolerance to not risk factions who grow to absolutely hate each other. And that's hard to prevent by technical setup alone.


[1] This latter is the only thing I vaguely worry about under Bay12Forums, save for the possibility of Author Existence Failure.

[2] True story, as an extreme of this I registered to a forum for an application a while ago with an eventual eye to discussing some aesthetic changes in line with other messages. They had a rule saying "Do not ask for help with XP, we don't support that!", which didn't seem to me to mean I shouldn't say that I was successfully running it on XP, in a casual context. Next thing you know, the post vanishes, then all the several posts I'd made vanished, then the session login fails. The only justification I got when I tried to check was that I'd "asked for help with XP", and thus seemingly got auto-banned (or semi-auto, as there was clearly a twitchy mod on a keyboard rather than just a pure regexp-inna-script - though it's possible the regexp mail-alerted the zealous moderator to release the ton of bricks I had drop on me) far quicker than any Escaped Lunatic on here who posts flagrant links to Viagra.

[Magmacube_tr]

Good forums are few and far between. Most are nothing but memories now.

The Age of The Wild and The Old has long since passed, and the Internet is now a much faster place. Slower platforms such as forums cannot compete in such environments. So, many smaller and less cohesive ones fell.

But I predict that the few great forums that are still up will stand for much longer than this. They passed the test of time. Like red dwarf stars, they will shine much less than other much brighter and larger platforms, yet they will outlast them.

This place is about 20 years old at this point. I don't see why it can't at least live for 10 more years.

Edit: Also, Do we suffer from bots? I never saw them. There was a bot assault on the smaller forum I inhabited before, Is it a problem with all forums?

[Frumple]

We get bots occasionally, yeah, or at least commercial spammers. Generally don't get to the point of bot plague, but they do show up occasionally. It is indeed something pretty much everything online has to deal with, forums very much included.

Thread tax, I do loiter around sufficient velocity a bit, these days. Spinoff from Spacebattles (there's been more than one of those, with SV probably being the most stable/sane/not-filled-with-underage-donkey-smut of the ones I'm aware of) over... stuff I don't remember, heh, covering mostly the same sort of stuff (fiction/vs discussions, writing stuff, forum games, etc.). Different sort of thing going on over there compared to B12, but it's mostly not bad. There's a few other users around here that also post there occasionally.

[Starver]

Edit: Also, Do we suffer from bots? I never saw them. There was a bot assault on the smaller forum I inhabited before, Is it a problem with all forums?

Without tempting fate, as already mentioned there are odd commercial-linkers[1] that I have noticed and reported and (SFAICT) got quickly nuked by someone or other up to and including the Prime Toad themselves. I have no doubt there are many more instances that someone else noted so much earlier that I didn't even get the chance to see them.

I once had a very basic web-board go very bad with recurring bot-spam (basically concerted SEO-linking rubbish for fringe web areas, it was in days without even much of a CAPTCHA capability by default and once identified as an 'open' board by various site-databases was very receptive to a recurring spam-effort by any script-kiddie who could be bothered. Eventually had to be closed to posting, and never did get completely cleaned of all rogue messages (which should have left just the ones related to Darwinian Poetry, which was the site's purpose, ironically). The whole site vanished (the last residual domain/server fees obviously expired for whatever reason) a number of years ago, or I'd show you. The real regular posters were generally a very good community (insofar as you could keep track of individuals) but the tsunami of gunk just sank the legitimate chatter entirely by the end of its postable era.

Things have changed a lot since then, though, and even  an SMF forum is itself a little long in the tooth. Next-next-gen web-accessible meeting places are being overtaken by ever-more-proprietry App-based E2E-encrypting multimedia-embedding datastream-enncapsulators that challenge both spammers and their maintainers in many additionally important ways. Luckily, also as mentioned, traffic and attention to traffic seems not to be so badly out of balance (whilst still being useful) and if DF itself does not suffer unavoidable inactivity (or become the Next Big Thing or 'suddenly' an Overnight Success, perhaps from the first proper Steam Release, in a dissapointingly Rowling-rather-than-Pratchett hyped up way) then there seems no reason why Bay12Forums should not continue to consistently shadow Bay12Games.


....well, that's all my opinion. I never thought LinkedIn was worth using, though, and have consistently resisted Twitter/Facebook/etc as (at first) fly-by-night fads and (later) all-too-popular platforms that it isn't worth belatedly trying to ingratiate myself into the culture of. So you might consider my experiences and attitudes a bit too misaligned to your idea of reality.

Spoiler: Whole lotta nested feetnete (click to show/hide)

[1] Without giving away all the the ways to avoid near-instant detection: posting something equating to "Yes, that's a good point!" with some random words linking to url.spamsite.ch/h3X4D3C1M4L?reference, necroing a three-year-idle thread that I had participated in, could well lead to some well-established Bay Watcher like me to call in the appropriate level of the Moderation Cavalry... And when you check the poster's account, they had just made three posts of similar nature[2], which get either further reports from me or a nod to them in the original report-field.

[2] Maybe a less obvious and apparently blameless 'test' post a week or two ago if they thought they were playing the 'long game', which probably indicates that such individuals[3] have a very widespread 'territory' of target sites to try to infiltrate, prod, test and then ramp up their campaign upon. Either that or they don't really have much time, in-between doing their day-job, getting visiting rights with their estranged children every weekend and rebuilding their fire-damaged kitchenette.

[3] Though it's probably an old-hat inroad, I recall that when last I was thoroughly looking through job adverts (early 2000s) as mandated by the Job Centre (while I was really looking for my next job in industry-specific places that didn't tend to include badly re-re-re-scraped text elements such as "—", and knew the difference between # and £ symbols) I'd occasionally come across an advertised job or two whose purpose was to "post to websites such messages as directed", which I'd print out just to point out to the disinterested (and uninterested) jobcentre person that it was probably not a particularly useful job to advertise. Though that was before the days of any real knowledge about Zero-Hours Contracts being notoriously worse.

[Magmacube_tr]

DF becoming the Next Big Thing. That still has a long way to go. It definitely won't happen with the incomprehensible eldritch abomination that is the DF's U.I and the 90 degrees difficulty cliff.

But the Steam Release? Maybe, maybe...

Forums occupy a niche that is pretty much immortal. This type of talking. Detailed and slow. Where there isn't a rush to write things so they won't be burried. It may take hours, days and even weeks to reply. It also allows for text based games to exist around.

As long as more than 2 people want to have slow paced conversation, forums will live.

[Bumber]

Remember the spam bots selling kitchens? Pepperage Farm remembers.

[Magistrum]

Remember dwarven skirts seasonal preferences?

Also, in topic, I think something awful still has some good stuff going around. Not that I have been there in a while, but it was at least alive last I checked.