Anyone else find it depressing to look down old topics and see all the now dead forums?

It's especially depressing when the topic is about what people hope for their forum to achieve, like the one asking about what they want from their forums before 2012. You see all these overly positive predictions, then click on a ton of signature links only to be met with stuff like 'this site is suspended' or 'error 404 the page couldn't be found'. Guess those stats about how so many forums die in their first year was pretty accurate after all...

So does anyone else find it a bit depressing to see that when you look back at old discussions here and on other admin sites?

 

It breaks my heart when a good forum ends up dying down and with nomore care in the world to try and revive.

 

I see it all the time and it's sad, but it just motivates me to keep working away at mine.
I've yet to "throw away" content, all my past forums and blogs still have their content on the web.
I've let domains expire though. I like to think that some of the old forums you see may have been sold and merged with larger forums.

 

Really? I don't care about any forum other than my own, as long my forum keeps growing then everything is all good for me.

 

I'm kind of disappointed that I never kept at least a db backup of my first forum...

 

It depends if I'm an active member of the community or not. If I've been active and they forum goes downhill, then of course, I'm going to feel some way about it because my posts just went to a waste.

And of course, that's what matters in my book as well.

 

I find it kind of awesome that my site is still around. The fact that some admins taunted me and now are gone...typical.

 

I'm in the process of reviving a forum and website that I'm sure most think is gone for good. I had some health issues and have been in a financial meltdown ever since. But, I see light up ahead!

I was able to make backups. Spam bots overtook the place while I was away. But, I have several layers of backups so I'll be able to roll things back to when the invasion was just beginning and clean things up. I want to preserve as much of the members' posts as possible. Hopefully, I'll still have a community by the time everything is back up. If not, I'll rebuild and regrow.

 

Okay. I don't like my time being wasted either but I'd only be a little disappointed if a forum I was active on dies, because I got bigger and better things to worry about.

 

Definitely. There's a forum I visit often and over the passed year or so the activity has really died down. Used to be active podcasts and threads, now it's barely alive. Like an old bone yard :-(

 

It makes me sad too - I feel like forum administration is one of the most time consuming hobbies in the world. I see people seeking hours upon hours of coding help/tweaking to get the forum exactly the way they want it, and then a few months later, the whole site is gone.

 

A good point, I remember being taunted by an admin when my site was starting and he took great glee in pointing out that we only had at that time 66 members. We now show: Members: 24,773. not big by some standards but we are happy with the numbers.

The admin who taunted had four sites that he ran, ALL of them are now gone! And he was indicted for hacking.
Bye Dave. Don't forget to eat ur greens.

 

I don't usually feel happy when a site is shut down (even a competitor), but I do have to find it a tad funny when a site in a similar niche that's spent a whole ton of money on various things and is run like a business goes down. It's always a bit amusing to see people who only care about the cash fail when against those who actually care about the site subject.

 

Good post! Very perceptive indeed.

 

I think it just reinforces my view that forums in general are dead. Moreso most of them are dead before they even start because they are designed in line with a person's idea and that idea (in terms of marketability) is often not feasible.

Then there's the point in case that running a forum is bloody hard work too. Spam, hackers, trolls, idiots, promoting, writing stupid keyword stuffed articles, competitions, doing stupid adsense and adwords ads, coding, writing scripts, contacting other site admins, facing unhappy members, writing bloody emails all day long.

Yes being an admin is real fun. I'm not surprised 95% of forums fail within a year. If that's not off the top of my head then it's a certified statistic as well. Take it as rule of thumb.

 

Besides being depressing, it's also frustrating find valuable posts where members decide to include videos or photos that after some time show broken.

Worst is when such media was the core part of the comment or had great value but, same as with signature links or on-post recommended site links, many sites are already dead, domains have expired and so on.

In the case of photos, it's always recommended get your member uploading those pictures to your own hosting space to avoid such thing, but when it comes to YouTube, I know is easier to embed a video than upload it to the forum, but when those videos are removed, what was the topic about?

People who post videos often forget to post a brief summary of what the video is about, hence once gone, you are clueless about what they were sharing or trying to comment.

 

I've been saying for a long time that online forums for the most part are finished, tends have changed with web users today and most die hard forum owners live in denial "refusing to see it that way". You can always point out the odd forums doing well, but most of them are either official type forums, or ones run around game servers e.t.c. Your hobby forums, or ones run around a niche offering nothing else but chatting - are doomed to fail these days from the start.

Forums used for general discussion about a niche, just don't interest people like they once did, because of social networking sites offering much more. The web is littered with large, but now since dead forums...

 

Wow, 24k members sure is a lot. How many years has your forum been online? I wonder how big my forum would be if I didn't go to jail back in 2o10. I had to start my forum from scratch again back in 2011. We have 4,500 members and 192k posts. We average about a good 1-5 new users per day.

 

From memory we opened AFI in about 2007. We are more concerned with the quality of the members and not so much with Quantity.

We also have deleted quite a few thousand spammers and nere do wells so the count would be higher if we had left them there.

If you have 192K posts this is good and something solid to build on.

 

Since I last responded to this topic, we now have 205k posts and 4,785 members. I think getting to 200k was the hardest, but getting to the next 200k and beyond will be even easier as more members join and become chatty. We have a good foundation currently and I'm quite proud of my community.