I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I'm old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren't many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it's normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.
I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.
yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.
Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.
From your stats, it's clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.
Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.
But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.
Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.
It's a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I'm happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/
Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn't think its still alive. Godspeed!
I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)
Thanks.
I guess I need to learn German now.
Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.
I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I'm old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren't many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it's normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.
I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.
yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.
Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.
From your stats, it's clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.
Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.
But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.
Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.
It's a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I'm happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/
Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn't think its still alive. Godspeed!
I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)
Thanks.
I guess I need to learn German now.
Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.
❤️
It's a pleasure!