Goodbye forums, Hello Facebook groups!

This is why I wish XF had a groups addon. My forum members love them. Sure there are addons that do this and that is what I’m using now, but I’ve had to transition to new group addons twice after those devs stopped pushing our updates.
What do you mean by Groups Add-on? Pulling Facebook Groups into a XF widget? Syncing posts? To me, it's like mixing oil and water, so don't really see the point.
 
Is this finally the end of my forum? I have a few groups I run on Facebook and this feature just popped up today. after my forum started slowing down a few years ago, I created a group on the same niche as my forum, I'm thanking myself I did. You can now manage posts within your Facebook group. I think this may be the beginning of the end folks!

This will put a nail in the coffin for one of my direct sales forums where the crowd has preferred FB and the only thing I had over FB was threaded and organized forums.

I think we need some communication on the direction of 2.1 already.
 
Last edited:
It’s been pretty evident for a long time that Facebook feels groups and communities is where its future lies.

They’re going to keep etching away at the feature set of classic forums to emulate them, such as the ability to categorise and organise threads, while still maintaining the longstanding strong Facebook value adds such as easy sharing from any website to any group, video upload, events, strong native app and mobile push.

Facebook groups definitely has it’s eye set in becoming essentially ‘Facebook forums’ over the coming years.

Most people from the groups with users I also interact with offline already call our Facebook groups the ‘forums’ for that particular hobby when chatting in person.

Classic forums are gradually losing their identity as actual ‘forums’ with casual users in the online community space. For many, Facebook groups offer everything they need from a forum and often more.
 
Not sure if anyone else sees it the same way I do, but 3rd party hosted content/discussions doesn't have portability in the data if you want to move it else where in future. You could spend 1000s of hours, money and effort in promoting and building up a 3rd party hosted discussion group i.e. facebook, google and other groups and have it one day all gone if the company hosting it changes it's policies or direction.

Maybe for folks starting out their 3rd party hosted groups won't see this at the beginning. But it's something to think about too. My Centmin Mod Xenforo forums experienced such as I originally started on Google+ Discussion group and built the community to 300+ users and there was the start a community. But when I switched to Xenforo, I had to restart the community from scratch and loose that Google+ Group I built and it's content - though some of the group members did follow me to my Xenforo forum.

Just some food for thought ;)
 
All one needs to do is Google "sites running Xenforo," or something similar. I have recently visited dozens of extremely active XF sites, with thousands of members and tons of recent activity. I don't think that forums are going anywhere. There will always be a need for them, just like there will always be those who won't use Facebook.
 
Not sure if anyone else sees it the same way I do, but 3rd party hosted content/discussions doesn't have portability in the data if you want to move it else where in future. You could spend 1000s of hours, money and effort in promoting and building up a 3rd party hosted discussion group i.e. facebook, google and other groups and have it one day all gone if the company hosting it changes it's policies or direction.

Maybe for folks starting out their 3rd party hosted groups won't see this at the beginning. But it's something to think about too. My Centmin Mod Xenforo forums experienced such as I originally started on Google+ Discussion group and built the community to 300+ users and there was the start a community. But when I switched to Xenforo, I had to restart the community from scratch and loose that Google+ Group I built and it's content - though some of the group members did follow me to my Xenforo forum.

Just some food for thought ;)
That was pre GDPR, right? Pretty sure data portability is one of the major aspects of GDPR.
 
100% sure user generated content is personal data. You are mixing up personal and private.
But yea, you probably would have needed to ask your 300+ members to get their data individually.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom