An online forum can help form a key part of your communication plan. The most popular platforms will allow you to pin specific posts to the top of the discussion so no-one misses any key statements.
Improving collaboration should be the near the top of your list of priorities. Collaboration can help to bring out the creative sides of your team members, as they can work closer together and bring new ideas to the table. What better place to do this than in a forum? People can contribute their ideas in the knowledge that it is stored in an online workspace that can be referred back to at any time.
There are many benefits to having engaged employees. Increased productivity and less absenteeism are just two reasons why companies as large as Google and Facebook continue to invest so much time and money into improving it.
By creating a thriving online community, your stakeholders will naturally feel more engaged with your project. Receive the 5 key methods of employee engagement straight to your inbox. Sometimes we can just simply ask a manager or colleague for help.
The last thing you want is to be left to deal with the problem alone! Simply create a discussion and ask your community for help. If everyone posts problems and responds to them, over time it will create a network amongst colleagues that will be actively supporting each other. Even better, as forum posts are generally archived, you can refer back to previous answers given to common issues to do with your project.
It could grow to become an FAQ or Wikipedia style resource for your team or even your whole organisation. Help drive usage of your online collaboration tool. It can also form a key part of your existing or new online collaboration tool. Not invested in one? Perhaps you should. Effective moderation can keep everyone in check there too, and place a lid on the toxicity that plagues the public side of the internet.
I've been pondering what it might have been like to grow up on the internet if I were a teenager in and hadn't found my village. I might have been sucked even deeper into the unmoderated chaos of social platforms, where there's an unspoken expectation to act performatively instead of as our authentic selves. Without adequate moderation or stringent enough rules , it's all too evident that bad actors poison the well , sow division and spread misinformation. Those lead people to have ideologies and perspectives that are harmful to society.
I'm all for free speech, but we'd still all be better off with reasonable moderators refusing to let people be dicks. In any case, my brain jives best with the order and structure of well-moderated message boards. They'll still be around for a long time to some degree, because many folks like me still prefer them to social platforms.
They're simply the best spaces for niche discussion groups that blossom into fully-formed communities. The FFPB may be gone, but all is not lost: one of the moderators has set up an unofficial postboard for the remaining members. I'm really glad that the community will stick together in some form, and I have my fingers crossed others who found a safe space on message boards can keep theirs together too, including those PlayStation Forums members.
If they can follow the example of the FFPB and move to a new forum, where they have to write out a response instead of half-heartedly clicking a like button, I bet the community will continue to flourish.
It just won't be as visible as it used to be. Sign up. As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever Twitter and Facebook just aren't as good as a message board for fostering discussions. Holt Sponsored Links. In this article: communication , editorial , foo fighters , forums , internet , message boards , playstation forums , social media , news , entertainment. All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company.
I run a small forum and occasionally somebody will post a new question on an old thread that's about the same topic. My two theories are that either they searched, ended up on that thread, then just replied because it was in front of them, or that they hope the original participants are going to be notified of their reply so it'll get more attention than a new thread.
Unfortunately, on some forums that's actually true and encourages this mess-making behavior. I don't see the problem with "omg me too! Just last week someone posted a question on a thread from over a decade ago asking what the end result of building something was.
I and several other people party to the original discussion explained the result, the performance of the system over the past decade and that options were different now Let's see Reddit do that. Bumping threads from a long time ago is a feature. Not a bug. Oh sure. I think it's important too. Just that people misuse it which is probably why they get locked. Overzealous admins do see big problems with that.
We handled this on our forum just by having an indicator that it's a revived thread. Worked well. Comments could be marked by mods or voted on to not bump a thread, making it a minor occasional annoyance rather than a real problem. Why not have an additional view to "new", "top" etc. That one should only talk about what a lot of other people currently want to talk about, or only for a certain amount of time, is really a dead end to me.
I had always assumed it was for a technical reason around not having to keep old threads in hot storage. Kind of ridiculous that any tin-pot hobby forum can keep decades of threads available but the biggest services can't. Where's economies of scale? It's not supposed to work like that. I can tell you why reddit does it. Because their entire architecture is built around new data being hot and old data not. The tiny tin-pot hobby forum can keep every single post in memory and it's not really a problem.
They can also do a full database scan pretty quickly. But reddit can't do that. If it's not in the cache, it takes a lot of work to pull the data from the database. And there is no way to cache the entire dataset.
That's why threads get locked at 6 months. So they can be statically archived for quick access. Economies of scale isn't really part of it, it's more about moore's law. The amount of actual user text content on even a comparatively large forum is Median size of a post was pretty close to Tweet-sized characters or so. The highly active user population was maybe 12 million another m or so posted at least once. Volume seems to have been about a million posts per week, for six years.
Which works out to less than GB of actual user-contributed text. Rendered and delivered, page weight was just under 1 MB excluding graphics , for a payload-to-page ratio of 0. Ironically, about the same as the ratio of monthly posting users to all accounts. But if you wanted to extract and store just user content and metadata, excluding video, storage requirements are surprisingly modest.
Values are extrapolated, unconfirmed. Corrections or suggestions welcomed. Reddit would save hundreds of terabytes doing it though.
I find it extremely unlikely that this is actually the case. If you can render an old thread as opposed to pre-rendered HTML and I doubt that is done for forums , there is no storage cost or performance benefit to preventing comments on it. New comments don't need to live in the same read-only storage as the old ones. They just need to be found when the old ones are rendered, and that's easy - the new comments are in hot storage after all.
IsopropylMalbec 11 months ago root parent next [—]. I agree with the first half of this. The second half implies that the original designer felt that historical comments were important, which I think any social MVP will disagree with. There is no reason unless you do some aggressive caching but forum software did not do a good job of making it clear that it's an old thread that has been revived.
So much this. The only engagement I'm allowed if I want to say thank you to someone who posted something really useful a year down the track is to pay for Reddit credit and apply a token of some kind. Which I have done. It's really sad that some great threads aren't allowed to live. With reddit, I'm sure it's just for performance reasons.
They can barely run their servers as is, even with people shelling out thousands for literal cosmetics. I maintain three forums, and it's harder and harder to get new users and get those new users to post useful stuff. People is getting used to post shallow content that contributes nothing. I had to ban some of them just because they posted too much noise.
Ultimately, I think this is a struggle that will only be mitigated by a migration to a new form of the Internet, one in which we are not encumbered by the ad driven, panopticon business model, and shallow click-bait sensationalism to keep it running. It became clear to me sometime after that Internet culture had entered into an obvious decline to some of the more critical parts of it that made it worth spending time on, I often relate it to how the early monolithic structures of Egypt were far superior to the later versions as it declined: something very critical was lost along the way.
Can it be recovered, with a great deal of sacrifice and hardwork I'm sure it can as HN is a constant reminder that many of those very same people who valued that spirit of the early days entered the Industry and went on be a part to build this system and are equally as disgusted and tired of this perverse abomination, that no amount of viral 4k streaming videos of an influencer showing off on holiday that 'breaks the Internet' was worth what was lost along the way.
I use stopforumspam, and have a little script to deal with spam, that queries a read-only copy of the main DB. Anyway, users report it before I realize someone spammed the forum. Also, if your userbase is not too specialized using a white list of email domains can help.
That makes some powerusers angry, so YMMV. I think that what happened is that Internet got totally democratized, so there's a lot of noise, and valuable people is lost in that noise. Lost in the sense of we have a hard time finding them, and they have a hard time finding us. I can't compete with the ad budget of all the social media trying to capture eyeballs.
And then you receive a lot of people who back in those times probably was thinking that forums are for nerds, and there you have it, your average idiot who demands to have an equal voice, but refuses to make any effort to contribute. It may sound like an elitist POV but honestly, this is how it is for me. I praise HN so much just because people here at least makes some effort. Became clear to you after November of ?
Harumph I say, harumph! It became clear to me in September of ! Kids these days! Get off my lawn! The internet today is terrible is a meme I remember being told by my fathers comp sci professor in when the WWW was starting. You will be glad to know that I was on newsgroups nearly a decade after 'Eternal September,' but I was eventually there. Myspace and facebook were already a thing, but I really think it was that paradigm shift that made the pan-opticon, ad driven system we see now.
That was NicoJuicy 11 months ago root parent prev next [—]. I've been able to block spam pretty effectively with a hidden input field. I think you'd probably find Urbit interesting - its goal is to solve that problem from first principles. User IDs that cost a small amount of money, P2P by default baked into the OS design without the user having to deal with running a server.
It's still early, but it works and I've been playing with it. TedDoesntTalk 11 months ago root parent prev next [—]. There are still some rare examples of large, active forums. See avforum. Maybe it's just different audiences but the spam was eventually so bad I moved multiple communities off of forums that we'd used for years and years- and got at least an hour a day of free time back in return.
In my experience spam is easily the biggest contributor to the death of forums, most groups just don't have the resources to keep their heads above water. I see people complain on platforms like Reddit or Discord about one or two spam messages getting through, I don't think they realize how good they have it. A channel I follow on YouTube just got a single spam comment which one of his followers responded to, and he made a 3 minute video about it. Can you imagine making a 3 minute video every time a spammer registered for your forums?
I've never been in the admin side. Thank you for your work. I'm sure your users appreciate it. I wonder if the problem is just that the barrier to entry is lower now than it once was?
Eternal September, Sturgeon's Law, and all that. I mean, there's plenty of "shiny or rusty new tool" posts on the machinery forum, but folks usually manage to turn any such thread into a nerd-fest regardless.
That seems to promote a culture that dissuades shallow interaction. I'm going to contradict my previous point and wonder instead if part of the issue is growing a community at a rate that allows new users to take over the culture without understanding the existing norms. But hey, I'm talking out my butt here. I'd love your take from the admin side. Like most things in life, not all growth is a good thing.
But not only are the growth people in charge, a lot of the seed money comes from people who only care about explosive growth. So there we are. Some people solve that with money. It takes very little of it to dissuade spammers.
But you can substitute other barriers too, like expertise. Criminals have the Dark Web to lurk about in. What would you call the equivalent but for white hats? ArcMex 11 months ago root parent prev next [—]. I remember it took 8 months for NeoGAF to approve my account back in college. By the time I was a member, I was putting a lot more thought into my posts and replies. One downside is that if you feel what you have to say isn't smart enough, you might miss out on an a conversation that could go interesting places.
Have a paid tier for new users. I ran a mailing list in the 00s that did this and the quality was astronomical. Can you share a link? Mmm, I rather keep HN apart from those forums, but those are in spanish anyway.
And half of the answers even the accepted ones are subtly wrong. And accepted answers that were right but get wrong over time still trump the right answers that were added later.
I think there's a type of mindless mob mentality created by systems like StackOverflow. Contrast that with the way forums used to work. You actually need to read the content and make your own judgement call on whether or not to use a lot of the advice.
The volume of poor quality participants on every platform seems to have skyrocketed in the last years. My favorite is anything related to ZFS. Discord's scrollback is -- as far as I can tell -- unlimited. One server I'm in has over 20M messages, and after some clicking I'm able to scroll all the way back to the first messages posted over four years ago.
You're absolutely right that discoverability for older messages is poor, though. RileyJames 11 months ago parent prev next [—].
I'm sure this applies to 's of 's of niches I've never heard about. Specifically I bought a BJ74 Landcruiser, and while the community may only be a few strong, there's no problem I haven't seen solved in the forum.
Plenty of the threads have starting posts from 's, but if you bump the thread today those same people are likely to respond! I bought an E46 M3 on the condition that I would learn to do the majority of the work, solely based on the fact that there was so much knowledge in the forums.
The forum went down earlier this year due to poor ownership — but luckily the core members revived it on a new site, and the old DIYs and knowledge are being slowly rebuilt. That forum plays no small part in making the difference in owning one of these cars a constant nightmare vs.
I sold it to somebody on a forum I used to frequent when I went hiking for 5 months without storage for it. Car people are the best people, and the forum for my current utterly quotidian ride has a couple of people who have been dispensing informed answers for years.
I'm with you that small communities can be totally viable and all around awesome. ETA: totally coveting your series. Similarly, useful info at gm-volt. And avsforum. My experience with Reddit is that topical subreddits are information-starved because the nature of Reddit is to reward picture posts instead of discussion or information. One of the ways to fight against this is to allow only text posts. Any sub that allows pics and gains enough people, the photos tend to float to the top. A clever pic is low engagement and can be consumed and upvoted in seconds.
Text posts with lots of good discussion take a while to consume. People passing by won't even bother to click on it and you will not be able to see the content outside of the sub's page itself. You have to at least click on the thing to up vote it or not.
I always thought this was a good idea. I've seen exactly one platform try it Quora and they dropped it for some reason. Their version was especially good because you had to read the full answer to even see the vote buttons.
Other forums implement some other form of quality control that's based on the user's reputation but I think this is better, as it can be enforced on every post, regardless of the user's reputation. Though there are other subs where even text posts seem to be clustered around beginner posts.
I mostly don't read subreddits day-to-day, but rather when I'm looking up information on a subject, try to find an applicable subreddit and search for what I need in that subreddit. So I've found it useful for things like: "which flashlight should I buy? So, I guess I mostly use it as a reference where the information density isn't important to me. Would it be useful to 'cross-post' these questions and answers? If you get a solution in one place type up a summary and post it in the other s so that the knowledge is spread around a bit.
It's a great lesson in the kinds of people various vehicles attract. In any case, at some point I remember seeing forums in search results and at some point after - never again. Welcome to the new consumable internet, lifespan of knowledge is 3 minutes. Perhaps someone solves topic modeling and knowledge graph AI and all the gibberish chats become knowledge in the near distant future. I hate to see discussions moving to Facebook groups. Often the groups are closed, you have to join to see what's inside.
Closed groups are not indexed by google, so everything that's written disappears in the Facebook silo. With web forums everything is indexed and you can find the relevant info even if it's written ten years ago, and you can see it without having to join first.
There's lots of useful info written on the web and a lot of this info is hidden behind social network walled gardens. Also, Facebook discourages anonymous accounts, even going as far as locking you out of the platform unless you supply the company with your cell phone number and driver's license.
As a result, there are many communities that I don't join, and there are communities that I stay silent in. For example, in the Facebook group for the area that I currently live in, it is common place to doxx people who disagree with majority of users. It's gone as far as having the mayor doxx a single mother because she was critical of decisions the city made, and I want no part of that.
What state is that in? I really hope this trend starts to reverse. Forums are one of my favourite things about the internet for all the niche knowledege you can find, but if it's locked behind Facebook with a useless search feature and a terrible UI , it might as well not be there in my opinion.
I think the infrastructure has rusted a bit. A while back I wanted to spin up a forum, and I wasn't super impressed. There's a mix of new projects that don't really get the forum thing they're often very focused on businesses rather than communities , and old PHP projects which haven't advanced since the early s. This also goes for the infrastructure around forums - several turnkey sites I tried simply didn't work, and I ended up deploying one myself through a crufty Bluehost portal.
Given that a lot of forum activity is driven by non-tech people, I'm not surprised they've started dying out. It's a shame, but the monoliths like FB have both the audience and the on-ramps. Edit: as a side note, I eventually gave up because I couldn't get my target community to join the forum. Most people were already on a Facebook group and uninterested in switching.
This is because it's trivial to create a subreddit, which gives you just about everything a standalone forum could want except self-hosting. A lot of forums want to not be joined at the hip with a cesspool of transient internet riff-raff which is exactly the problem that platforms that try to cater to everything reddit, 4Chan have.
It's impossible to have real quality discussion about anything when the people who have deep interest in the subject are outnumbered by people with passing interest. It's an interesting trade-off BUT Reddit also gives you a suite of moderation tools out of the box.
You can set rules, and benefit from site-wide policies that keep you on the right side of the law most of the time. It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it seems to have won the segment by a fairly large margin. The moderation tools are pretty poor once you start needing to do anything more advanced than banning users.
BlueTemplar 11 months ago root parent prev next [—]. Reddit is a waste of time because threads get locked after a couple of months. Quarrelsome 11 months ago root parent next [—]. RES kinda sorta helps with that in old. I think the usage of advanced didn't merely mean alive, but changing and growing. A membership org I help with their IT needs has come to realize that the member email lists have become moribund, and so we've been discussing forums Oh, Discourse, probably most annoying forum software available thanks to its stupid scroll hijacking.
Wasn't there a startup about 10 or 15 years ago dedicated to building communities of communities. I think it was called Nine-something and was started by one of the early internet big shots I tried searching for this on Google but failed miserably.
I have a cousin that used to work there years ago when social media was still in its infancy. He was part of the initial wave of layoffs when they weren't able to get traction against Facebook. That's it! Thank you. It was driving me nuts and I started to wonder if I imagined it.
Looking at it today, it's changed a lot in the past 15 years OscarCunningham 11 months ago parent prev next [—]. Lots of old web forums are actually not indexed. I get zero results. Although of course that page might be indexed now that I've linked to it from HN. You can find a similarly old post on that site to check.
In my experience Microsoft Bing does much better than Google at returning search results from old forums. Google has a bunch of things just flat out missing in its search index, even things I'm sure I found by Google years ago and that still exist on the same sites. I obviously didn't check before you posted your comment, but I checked before I posted mine and Bing found your test case with no difficulty.
Seanambers 11 months ago root parent next [—]. In my experience Google search results have gotten less and less informative for a very long time last years.
Seems to me Google at some point in the past decided it wasn't going to show everything, only what it meant i needed to see, monetization on the other hand has gone up. Agreed , although I give them the benefits of doubt because modern internet can make far more web pages than Google could keep up with indexing. Especially after the Smartphone took off and Internet seems to be exploding with Content Farm.
Google used to have a "Discussions" search option that you could select, which would return results from forums that they indexed. I'm not versed in SEO, but I've assumed this means linking here won't affect indexing. It will index those pages but it won't pass any "juice" aka reputation. It will probably also confer at least some reputation. Does that make it not get indexed, or not get included in weights? That's correct. When I was researching why Google wasn't indexing many of our threads, I found the same thing was happening to other large forums.
Also facebook groups are absolutely awful for finding the knowledge that's already there. I'm in a few facebook groups for car enthusiasts, and why the general experience is positive, every few days we get people joining and asking the same questions over and over and over again. Search is abysmal and there really is no ability to create "sticky" posts like on old forums, so it's just bad.
And the Facebook UI really hates conversations. There are only 1-deep threads, if a post has hundreds of replies you see maybe 5 Facebook will say they're the "Most relevant" because probably the amount of Likes and you have to click "Load more comments" dozens of times to try to read all the responses.
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