Agreed ^
Disagree. Community discussion and online participation/engagement is increasing at an exponential rate. Just not in the methodology/presentation that you likely associate with the term Forums. Thus, why software developers have to decide if they are making a Forum, or a community engagement system/suite.
Also agree with this. I spoke to two people this week at a hobbyist meetup and we were talking about content on 'The Forums', we got confused because for a few minutes we were talking about two different websites. They were talking about Facebook groups, I was talking about one of the two other classic style 'forums' for that hobby.
One of them was only pushed to register and get onto Facebook so he could follow the (group) forums. Not for the traditional reason of connecting with friends/family.
One of the guys lives on a canal boat and so facebook groups is way more engaging and a compelling mobile experience, so he uses that platform as it's better on his phone.
For many people now, Facebook groups are their complete online forum and community experience. That is the current/next generation forum experience for many users in 2017.
They got the basics right cross platform, they have the core basic (live) connectivity down pat (yes live should be considered basic these days if the sites in a 1st world country with HQ internet access). They got the app working well, they got one click 'group/forum' joining spot on so lots of people are members of dozens or even hundreds of groups, they got push and desktop notifications sorted, they got live user direct messaging sorted on desktop and mobile (again with push, which is what makes it work and flow so well)
Now they're pushing more classic forum like features out. You can now connect groups to eachother to make a more node like structure. Got a popular hobby group? Create a new BST one and link them. Bam, you now have a new node and some kind of structure to your fbook community.
I saw new mod and
admin badges appear a couple of week ago, postbit style. I'm sure that will get extended.
The next gen of classic forums needs to be super easy to use and get all the core parts of community seamless cross platform.
Easy registration
Easy posting in the right subforum without confusing new users and daunting them with a list of 100 categories browse through
Easy sharing of images
and video (to any post, not just a gallery)
Much better private chat interfaces with live updates (I regularly start chats with users on my XF site and we switch to Facebook chat or What'sApp after a few messages as it's so frustrating not having live updates or have a small chat window follow you around the site as you browse, it's crap in comparison)
Push to phones and desktop alerts for thread and private message replies to keep conversation flowing
Better discoverability of all newly published content types and any content that has had recent comments.
Tightly integrated events or calendar system to help facilitate offline community and meetups in addition to the online forum.
The quality of the XF2 mods and 3rd party devs will dictate how quickly XF can compete and shine in it's own right in comparison. Especially those developing the phone apps. Sadly I'm not sure how successful any of the phone apps will be without being first party and very tightly integrated into the core or at least aligned with the XF2 vision and roadmap so that it can be designed and developed with the long term vision in mind and the flexibility to instantly enable new add-ons and have tweaks and features go live in the app after being configured in the forum ACP.
The backend must be able to accept any type of user generated content too, ie. video (even if it's offloaded to a 3rd party service like YouTube). A sure fire way to send a user off to another platform is telling them they can't submit a basic content type for technical or other reasons. Without that and many other features, and until we do have a great app, (classic) forums will never truly be next-gen and cross platform integrating the native features that matter and a mobile UI that's beautiful, user friendly and re-engages the user at the right moment.