Forums are dead

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No room for improvement.
+Lock thread.
 
Speaking of inflammatory...

I think it's important to note that while XenForo has many "community software" features and ideas, and is very much successful for it, KAM's vision for it is overwhelmingly as a forum first. Many of us - and me, heavily - bolt other things onto it, and it's so very extensible that this is easy to do. But it's not expressly designed for it.

You can see this just from the front page - it's a "compelling community experience," but in the same breath they call it "forum software." Not community software, not social software, forum software. And it is still the best at what it does, and it is still the most successful forum software around at the moment in terms of new, active communities.

And despite being commercial forum software, it's still doing rather well for itself. Food for thought.
 
I think moving my forums into the Facebook platform using xenForo as my app software will be the win/win situation for me. the best forum software within the widest used social network.
 
In my opinion the only power of forums is the ability to contain information.

Youtube contains music and videos. Facebook, Twitter, and so on contains "network".
Wikipedia contains information, but one-sided information. You can't ask something. You hear just one version of something written by someone.

Forums have the ability to contian information, but with interaction. I can create a thread and ask for help. I could also read an article on wikipedia about my problem, but in most cases it will not tell me how to delete the virus from my pc.

But the problem with this is to find the relevant information, this is time-consuming and mostly not easy to find.
So, that means a forum(software) should concentrate on how to be a better information supplier with perfect search and index system.
Information must be easy to find. So, if a forum(software) can offer this, it will never go down.
That means in future just those forums(software) will survive which can afford this. All trash forums with trash content will die, and they are dying.
Why? Because the trash content went to Facebook, Twitter, and co.
With trash content I mean daily, popular, political content stuff.
Of course networking is another reason why people left. But networking was never a big thing of forums. This is not a lost. They lost the trash part. Now just the unique ones will survive if they can keep containing information.
I hope you all understand what I want to say.
 
But the problem with this is to find the relevant information, it is time-consuming and often not easy to find.
That is the major weakness of forums.
Moderators here can say 1000 times for people to read the FAQ, but FAQ reading isn't improving. Why ? Because it's not easy to find.

So, that means a forum(software) should concentrate on how to be a better information supplier with perfect search and index system.
Forums searching is horrid. It's very "expensive" in terms of CPU, RAM, and disk space utilization - and the results are poor. And Every forum does it almost the exact same way. IMO.

Concise information that is easily searchable / findable is nirvana. Hard to say if forums will get better in these two regards.
 
That is the major weakness of forums.
Moderators here can say 1000 times for people to read the FAQ, but FAQ reading isn't improving. Why ? Because it's not easy to find.


Forums searching is horrid. It's very "expensive" in terms of CPU, RAM, and disk space utilization - and the results are poor. And Every forum does it almost the exact same way. IMO.

Concise information that is easily searchable / findable is nirvana. Hard to say if forums will get better in these two regards.

I'll disagree with that. I put it down to laziness, bone idle people. Disagree? then I ask how easy is the search function on here or any media to find? Not so difficult but it doesn't entice people to use it the majority of the time. Why is this?
 
I'll disagree with that. I put it down to laziness, bone idle people.
The problem is structural.
Just like the lack of structure in threads prevents relevant data organization of topics.

Just talking about the FAQ issue.

#1) Here is a Help page. http://xenforo.com/help/ Zero mentioning of the FAQ. A link to the FAQs on this page would make the FAQ findable.

#2) The Help tab isn't listed where everyone hangs out.
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#3) Search for the word FAQ here. What do you get ? Do you get the FAQ ? No.

It's too easy to say the problem is laziness. Not to mention the big big problem .... the people coming here to buy and talk about Xenforo are forum experts. If they can't find stuff ... what chance do their "average forum" member have ? A: Not good.

The problem finding the FAQ at Xenforo.com is structural.

Xenforo is the best forum I've ever used.
I hope Xenforo 2.0 is the best Community software I ever use. (Communities have content needs that are beyond just threads).
To get there ... Xenforo must enable communities to easily create community-driven structured content. (Admins can't create all the content themselves.)
 
I think there two issues here, one of which being semantic. I think it would be helpful in this context to define the two major terms in use:

  • Forum - a medium (as a newspaper or online service) of open discussion or expression of ideas.
  • Community - a body of persons or nations having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests.

It seems we use both words interchangeably to describe the sites we visit where there is (forum or community) software powering discussions. Whichever of the two words we happen to be using at the moment, the reality is that these sites are both things at the same time and you really can't separate them.

Another word we use loosely is:
  • Content - the principal substance (as written matter, illustrations, or music) offered by a World Wide Web site.
Content isn't "threads". Content isn't encyclopedic discourse. Well, of course it could be but that's not its essence when you're talking about a forum community. In our world, content is the evolving written record of a group of individuals who would probably never meet and interact in "real life" but who share some commonality that binds them together to engage in discussions. We should strive to make our content as useful as possible, but it's not a reference manual we're working on, it's a transcript. And it's the summed knowledge and experience of the group and the amplifying effect of the internet that creates it.

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The internet in general and forums (and social media of all kinds) has a great amplifying affect - it brings people together but in the case of forum communities, the common factor is often a single interest. And not only is this shared interest amplified, so are all the differences. This can lead to problems, as we all know.

At any rate, I personally think that there is no good alternative to online forum communities. However, the current weaknesses of these sites (be they structural as in flawed or inadequate forum software, or interpersonal as in issues with the site owner, staff, and/or members) are, at the moment, working against them. Meanwhile, the popularity of the social media sites among the young people (who currently drive online trends) is drawing people away from us. But at some point the limitations of these sites and increasing average age of the trendsetters will reverse the process and forums will make a comeback.

The pendulum swings both ways, and often seemingly too far in each direction before reversing course.
 
It's just progress. Good sites run by dedicated owners are still good, they're just surrounded by more and more poor quality sites / content.

The web was originally a place for geeks - your average Joe couldn't start a website for love nor money, they just didn't have a clue. As the Internet (and WWW) has grown, so the technology has become easier to use - Famous 5 minute install anyone? Wordpress is the web's 19th century printing press - en-mass production at cheaper-than-ever cost (free WPs and shared hosting/VPS ;)). vBulletin 3 did the same for forums. (y)

As more and more people have become empowered to "publish" on the web, so the volume of low quality content has increased; primarily driven by people with little or no knowledge of their subject matter and who's only passion is to try and make a fast buck, but also pre-packaged Adsense / ecommerce sites and oodles of copy-cat blogs.

Facebook is all about "me", and forums are all about the subject / shared interest ... and there's plenty of room for both. (y)

Cheers,
Shaun :D
 
We are hitting records every week and every year...

I'd say average to poor forums (and internet sites) are dead. Google updates have killed them if the owners haven't already.

The idea of forums as being easy to start and run......maybe that's dead.

But, tell me, where can you get information on sailing? On old Boston Whalers boats? On the best surfing spots? How about the best ways to fix your mac?

Every once in a while someone starts a ridiculous thread such as this...or, will facebook kill forums, will twitter kill forums, etc.

Sorry, they don't get it.

Forum search does suck. But google searching does not and that is how most people end up landing on the very pages they need on our forum.

XF can't wave their hands and create what Google did....virtually no one can. Sure, someday that limitation will be gone....some extension of google or smart open source search will come along to make it so.

But, for now, this is as good as it gets and does the job for most folks.
 
I've been hearing the forums dying out bit since the first social networks like Friendster were popular or that site Bebo. Still not dead. If your forum dies it's really your fault or the niche's, but likely the former. If it's a crap forum, it's a crap forum. Facebook going away isn't going to save your baby.
 
Forums aren't dead, just dangerous to your Google Adsense if you don't enforce rules or have a good moderating team. Threads talking about inappropriate content such as modding/hacking, risque piques or sex talk can get your domain blocked by Google. Because forums rely on user-generated content and not so much on a site's staff to create pages and articles like any other content management system, it's more susceptible to spam and stuff that will get easily banned in google.

So I decided to go the blogs route but use Xenforo instead of Wordpress and just keep my forum private.

http://xfaddons.com/threads/featured-blogs-slider-with-ratings.189/

^^^I was going to pay Rigel extra to do this but he said that he was gone for the rest of the year until January. So it looks like I'll be using Showcase again. It's like the Resource Manager but I will be using it more to feature content worth putting ads on. Putting it on threads has not been too good for me in the past. It also didn't help that my forum had too many links that required members to login to view certain content and google hates that. That's what google reported to me the most. They kept asking me to create a bot to login for google but I ain't doing all that.

So I've settled on taking some work-safe threads, convert them into both blogs and showcase items, asked for an importer.

http://addons.nfljunkies.com/threads/thread-importer.715/

But yeah read my notice about my site's new direction. http://8th.us

As far as 8th is concerned, forums ain't dead, in our case, they're better off private.
 
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