General Forums are not as popular as they once were.

[Arantor]

Also worth noting that with social media, we haven’t evolved to understand what we have made.

Humans have been a social species, for the most part, forever. The need to live in groups and maintain social contact long since evolved beyond survival (food, shelter, safety etc) into something more intangible. But humanity has yet to evolve the capacity to truly understand the hyper connected world we have wrought.

Facebook, X, etc are firehoses (indeed the Twitter API was once literally called this), where what is unleashed is a torrent of opinion, communication etc. - one needs to quench their social thirst, to fill their communal bucket but the firehose is a quantity we have no idea how to deal with, emotionally or psychologically. When you can ask a question and get hundreds or thousands of opinions in response, how do you deal with that?

Forums are faucets (taps), you don’t get a torrent of volume of water, but a pace that you can drink from, and you can fill your bucket. You can ask a question and get sufficient response to move forward without being drowned in a sea of them.

 

[ken_gitahi]

I have never read forum analysis as good as this one. When you have pointed out the major issues with the software, and I do not have any reasons to disagree, I will add one more point, forums do not have search friendly content. If you search online, do you see any forum topics appearing on the search results? Game is a popular niche for forums, how many times do you see forum topics appear on search results when you search for game related topic. However, you might see Reddit and Quora frequently appear on search results page. We need to create topics that will get ranked on search engines.

Forums appear in search engines all the time, but they used to a lot more in the past. There have been several updates to Googles "algorithm" and search ranking functionality that has elevated platforms like Quora and Reddit in place of forums.

 

[Nomad]

Forums appear in search engines all the time, but they used to a lot more in the past. There have been several updates to Googles "algorithm" and search ranking functionality that has elevated platforms like Quora and Reddit in place of forums.

I see Quora and Reddit as a forum, they might not appear like the forums most of us are used to but they certainly have the elements of forums in terms of how discussions happen

 

[Arantor]

They have something forums don’t, the same thing social media doesn’t.

They don’t make you put your topic in a category. Yes, you have to put it in a subreddit or a Quora space, but that’s essentially the same as putting it on a specific site rather than being on a site (=subreddit) and then having to pick a category.

I continue to wonder if our adherence to structure and categorisation (for archival benefit, ultimately, in theory) is in fact hurting our cause.

In fact for the one site I still have, I’ve debated cutting all the boards down to one and just using prefixes for lower friction.

 

[Cloaked]

They have something forums don’t, the same thing social media doesn’t.

They don’t make you put your topic in a category. Yes, you have to put it in a subreddit or a Quora space, but that’s essentially the same as putting it on a specific site rather than being on a site (=subreddit) and then having to pick a category.

I continue to wonder if our adherence to structure and categorisation (for archival benefit, ultimately, in theory) is in fact hurting our cause.

In fact for the one site I still have, I’ve debated cutting all the boards down to one and just using prefixes for lower friction.

You hit the nail right on the head. By using categories and then a number of forums in those cats we are making it harder for users to find things. Couple that with the fact that forum search is inherently bad. Better than it was. Still not good. I use Google to search a forum for what I'm looking for instead of forum search.

We as admins are familiar with the layout we been using for years. Some admins are ready for change. They don't know how to do it in a easy way. Some admins are headstrong and will never even consider changing. Maybe because of loyalty to a particular software product. Maybe because they are afraid to step outside the box. In any case a change needs to happen.

 

[Arantor]

The flip side of course is that if you don’t have categories, it’s far harder to organise anything in case you want to come back to it later.

Google is an option but only if your content is public, and of course that won’t always be true. Boards often also form the boundary within a forum in terms of visibility and security - having private vs public boards.

The other problem is that Google has been able to funnel thousands and thousands of developer hours at doing cool things with search, and we haven’t. I sometimes wonder if a coalition of forum platform devs would ever achieve anything to pool our collective knowledge but even then it’s only a bucket against an ocean, versus a droplet or two.

Though there are things that are interesting on the horizon - I suspect AI, carefully curated and trained, might be able to do something with improving forum search and perhaps even suggesting categories so that users don’t have to pick one but the platform itself selects the best category for a topic from its content. Work to be done for sure but it’s an avenue to experiment in.

 

[Cloaked]

The flip side of course is that if you don’t have categories, it’s far harder to organise anything in case you want to come back to it later.

Google is an option but only if your content is public, and of course that won’t always be true. Boards often also form the boundary within a forum in terms of visibility and security - having private vs public boards.

The other problem is that Google has been able to funnel thousands and thousands of developer hours at doing cool things with search, and we haven’t. I sometimes wonder if a coalition of forum platform devs would ever achieve anything to pool our collective knowledge but even then it’s only a bucket against an ocean, versus a droplet or two.

Though there are things that are interesting on the horizon - I suspect AI, carefully curated and trained, might be able to do something with improving forum search and perhaps even suggesting categories so that users don’t have to pick one but the platform itself selects the best category for a topic from its content. Work to be done for sure but it’s an avenue to experiment in.

True. For now we look at sites like Reddit, which is categorized, and see how easy it is to interact. I think IPB had the right idea when they created a thread view option for users to use. Categories in the sidebar like subreddits and all the meat and potatoes in front of you.

Discourse is gaining popularity, some might say it is the number forums software for enterprise at present, and the reason is because the way data is presented. Plus their search does really work. Don't know what they did. Maybe python and postgresql is just that much more efficient.

 

[Arantor]

Reddit’s categorisation is really nothing different to a forum without boards. A subreddit is, functionally, a board and you can just post in that without any more effort. But as for being better organised, I have to strongly disagree - since the WordPress drama I’ve been a regular lurker on r/WordPress, and I find everything about Reddit a chaotic sprawling mess. Organising by “hot” by default is unhelpful, the nesting showing you a couple of levels but then forcing you to a new page for deeper levels is inconsistent, and good luck finding anything in there after a bit.

As for Discourse, categories along the side is hardly a new idea (then again Discourse is also a decade old at this point), and for some types of site it can work. Search being better is primarily a function of Discourse’s subtle behaviours encouraging you to stay on topic, with short topics, rather than the technology (Postgres FTS isn’t light years ahead of MySQL’s and the rest of the software being in Ruby doesn’t change that. Honestly most of its “enterprise adoption” is really a function of extreme declutter of the interface and repackaging the experience with infinite scroll. Having a pseudo celebrity run it doesn’t hurt either (it’s founded by the guy who co-founded Stack Overflow)

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I think forums are still popular with those of us who've always enjoyed being on them and running them.

But new generations were born on social media. That's their forum. We were born on forums.

I think we need to focus on each other and people within our age groups and niches rather than trying to convince generations to convert.

 

[Arantor]

That didn't stop Facebook making a march on very much “not its demographic” for the longest time, but more concerningly if we concentrate on our demographic, it’s guaranteed to be shrinking rather than growing.

Gotta get the young’uns hooked the way we were.