By now, you likely already have seen someone online lament the loss of forums. Forums used to be the best places online, and then Reddit/Twitter/social media happened, and then it got worse with Discord. That’s the narrative anyway. In reality, nothing ever happens for no reason whatsoever online, and trying to assume such comes off like a bizarre perversion of history in the vein of Idiocracy’s Time Machine:
As someone who used to be addicted to many now-lost forums like crack cocaine, I can tell you exactly what killed most forums.
See; for the longest time forums were the place people posted online. Essentially a replacement for old-school USENET groups, BBSes, and mailing lists (which have become highly niche and populated by boomers who remember the “good old days”, or only end up used for software development like the Linux mailing list), forums were an evolution of these for the internet era. Forums were places where people could post, usually on some topic related things, and eventually they became the backbone of internet discussion for decades. Even with their decline, the rise of VerticalScope buying out old message boards and data scrapers mining forums for LLM datasets are proof that at one time, they were in fact the backbone of the internet.
But eventually, discussion on things would move “offsite”, usually to more centralized communities such as imageboards and Reddit. As time went on, many forums went belly up and folded, especially discussion forums for video games hosted by the publishers. Discussion of everything would move to social media posts that had to be sifted through, community subreddits, and worst of all Discord. Discord was perhaps the worst one out of these due to the “walled garden” nature of it not seen since paid services like AOL: you have to join a server with their client to see anything that goes on or is discussed. In fact, we’re in a dark age where publishers would rather make a Discord over a forum and download links for mods are shared via Discord.
As someone who has lived through the forum era, I can explain why forums died with many examples.
Poor-quality mods and admins
Forum moderation is probably the number 1 reason that people would escape them if they could. If social media runs on nameless mods, many of whom work in sweatshops that oftentimes are offshored to Africa or India (especially after certain scandals like Facebook’s moderators having PTSD), forum moderation is similar to that of a fedi instance or bad Discord server: one guy is the admin, he appoints mods, and everyone does what he says. It’s his forum, his rules. This structure in many cases leads to bans, bad decisions, and many more insane incidents that after a certain amount of time, end up with users trying to provoke the moderators on or off-site (as seen with SomethingAwful’s many offshoots such as Something Sensitive).
You can get banned, restricted, or censored for any reason. New account and you’re posting a lot? You’ll get your account flagged as spam possibly and have to endure a cooldown process (more on this later). If you’re not deep in the forum culture, you can get mocked as well. This is more notable with older forums (with a tight-knit community) that essentially give new users special titles to remind you that they’re new users and while this is done to keep a community going, it can also backfire for many. Posting on any forum is a great exercise, as you’ll quickly learn why forums died off. Get deep enough and you’ll find out just how much disdain some people have for the moderation team, and when it gets bad enough, you’ll start to see “offshoot” sites pop up or private groups where people will talk for hours about bad admins. I’ve heard stories of moderators on some forums even leaking DMs and spying on users, which something like VB/Xenforo lets you do (if not directly, via probing the database yourself). In fact, you could argue it was a deliberate design choice to call them “Conversations” on XenForo due to this. This isn’t solely a forum issue, as it’s well known that Twitter lets the government read your DMs, so you can infer it probably means lots of other people at the company can too. I mean, the Chinese government managed to subvert a government wiretap system before.
Ironically, Reddit’s “powermod” issue is just history repeating itself again, just on a wider scale. Thanks to how Reddit works, one moderator can moderate hundreds to thousands of communities at once, using scripts to ban and moderate people without even having to do so physically, and banning people from numerous subreddits for posting in one subreddit. This has led to some interesting consequences, such as “throwaway” accounts to avoid “tainting” your main account’s post history and not letting your post history taint the thread as users dig into it.
There’s also the opposite problem: admins trying to take on the old-school 2000s-early 10s libertarian “anything goes” mindset that was in the minds of people like Aaron Swartz, where they see no reason to ban discussion of anything as that would be literal censorship. This is something that has hurt 8chan.moe (a clone of 4chan with the gimmick of any user being able to run their own imageboard), where the website has a reputation for harboring people you don’t want your site associated with, as the admin sees no reason to ban it. This drives users away from the site as well. While 8chan’s posts-per-hour count is much higher than it was before 4chan went down, it’s still a fraction of its peak when 4chan was down. Much of this has been attributed to the reputation of the moderation team and not solely 4chan coming back. I’ve also seen communities that rotted away because the admins refused to make decisions that should have been common sense.
Censorship and gatekeeping
No, I’m not talking about political censorship here. While some websites are notorious for political flamewars and censorship such as ResetEra, old-school NeoGAF, and SomethingAwful, I’m not referring to politics. What I am referring to is something else entirely; censoring information and “gatekeeping” it somehow.
For example, a radio forum has a giant pinned post about how you can only get Motorola software from Motorola themselves, and pay big money. Nevermind the fact that this post is outdated as Motorola will now hand over the software to any enthusiast who kindly asks. A post on this from back in the day even still says that you have to purchase them.
In this case, it sort of makes sense. Nobody wants the forum to get shut down, given how much of a massive target forums were and still are. Nobody wants to be the next Aaron Swartz over hosting some tool that lets anyone program a radio. But as the classic famous quote goes, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Websites like Archive.org with lax moderation have users passing around the same files that forums would gatekeep years ago.
There are other examples of gatekeeping too on forums. There’s forcing users to login to download files, which just results in throwaway accounts being made. Some of them require post counts or increasingly higher limits to merely download files, or require faux user interaction of posting “great post” to get access to download a file. However, it gets worse. Some websites (notably ones with car flashing/modding tools, laptop repair schematics and BIOS dumps, etc.) will “paywall” content until you sign up and pay a fee, and they get many people doing this because you just can’t find the files elsewhere. They’re gatekept, hoarded amongst a few where only the elites can get access to them with threats of banning anyone who leaks the files. For many, I’m sure this is a sour introduction to forums.
Oftentimes, amplified censorship and gatekeeping can directly lead to the death of a forum, and a great example of this is the aftermath of the Pokemon Black and White pre-release cycle. Before Black and White, Pokemon fansites were always delivering the scoop about the latest Pokemon leaks, posting CoroCoro scans of articles about new Pokemon titles and going to extreme measures to get leaks. This would cumulate in the Pokemon Black and White era where it went to extreme levels. There was a website admin sneaking into a theater in Japan to snap a photo of a new Pokemon during an intermission, leading to some outcry in Japanese sites (there was a massive flamewar swept up by forum admins on a forum I was on over this incident). There were leakers who got early copies and went online, posting the “new Pokemon” before the release, and Serebii and Pokebeach had databases with these new Pokemon before release.
Then disaster struck, and September 19th 2010 would be a dark day for Pokemon fansites. That was the date when Serebii and Pokebeach got takedown notices for posting images of the new Pokemon. Since that date, many Pokemon fansites would never post anything that Nintendo didn’t reveal yet through official channels, and discussion would get swept up. Want to know what sites didn’t care? Social media sites, like Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan’s /vp/ board. If you wanted to see leaks for the new Pokemon games, those were the places to go to online. In fact, just a few years later when the Pokemon X and Y release hype cycle happened, leaks were posted to places like 4chan’s /vp/ board, which explicitly allows leaks of new games as long as you spoil them.
Bulbagarden and Serebii forums are relics of the past, collecting as much dust as unsold Xboxes at pawn shops as all the discussion and hype moved off-site. Social media sites handled this differently in the pre-Trump era: let users post first and ask questions last. This led to huge amounts of users being stuck on some of these sites when the censorship inevitably increased, and Reddit now is a draconian dumpster fire where moderators have many “tools in the toolbox” to stop discussion. Just look at how some communities are scared about breaking “global rules” all the time.
Of course, you could argue that old Reddit was even laxer than 4chan at one point. Essentially “old Reddit” (especially before Trump) ran on a cycle: Reddit would host some community that would make anyone with internet hosting experience and a mild sense of self-preservation ask “why would you allow this”, a journalist would write an article that this thing exists, and it would be taken down. Most notably, this was infamous with the Jailbait subreddit, which was increasingly seen as a front for passing around outright illegal images of underage girls. The subreddit would get media coverage everywhere from The Daily Dot to CNN, leading to a shutdown and many people to ask the obvious question: “but why?” A few years later in 2015, when Reddit users began to post nudes from one of the most protected classes (celebrities), they would shut that down too. Also around this time, the massive cultural shift on social media would lead to “hands off” moderation simply no longer being able to exist, as anything that was politically incorrect just had to go. If in 2015 or 2011 hands off moderation was a massive liability, in 2017 hands off moderation was impossible. Over time, the cycle about controversial subreddits would evolve from said communities talking about something that was outright illegal or disgusting, to the mindset of “this subreddit is full of people I don’t like, shut it down” that AgainstHateSubreddits was known for.
Yet, this exact approach to moderation is what led many people to use these mainstream sites. If you can’t discuss this topic on a forum, you’ll go to where you can discuss it.
Interestingly enough now gatekeeping happens for a different reason: if in the past it happened to curate a cool kids club or a paywall mechanism, now there’s examples where it happens solely to keep a good thing from not being ruined by the types of people who use Reddit. It’s a fine line for any admin to walk when you have to decide between user growth and post quality.
The forum software is now garbage
This is something that reaches way beyond forums, but there have been many cases where forums either get killed off via software switchovers, bad releases of software, etc. Sometimes a forum might move to a model mimicking Reddit, as Bungie.net’s forums have. Other times an update to a forum software might come out, and nobody will like it.
VBulletin used to be the backbone of forums a decade ago. Not only did most forums worth their weight run it, and not only did people actively seek out the chance to buy it, but running broken pirated “nulled” copies was really popular for some forums. That’s right, they chose to pirate it instead of running on PHPBB or SMF or something that’s free. Nowadays it’s nowhere near as big, with smaller forums still running it and SomethingAwful eeking it out on their excessively hacked up version of VB 2.2.9. There’s a very good reason for this: In 2009 there were disagreements with the new ownership and direction of the software and many of the core devs left. While VB4 would come out in 2009, this was the last main version anyone would think of running. Despite this, VB4 had the “Gnome 3” issue; it was bloated and had massive issues and alienated everyone. Many websites stuck out with 3.8 for ages as a result. The lifeline would come for these forums stuck on VB in 2011 when XenForo was introduced, and many forum owners migrated to this. XenForo now runs a grand majority of active forums online these days.
There are also many forum programs that are also abandoned or trashy, mostly paid programs. Nobody runs Invision anymore for example, and there’s plenty of “shitware” that companies seemed to run in the past instead of running VB like a normal forum would. I know Microsoft loved to use Telligent CommunityServer for some forums as an example because it ran on ASP.NET. There’s also some forum programs that are a pain to use, I’m not a fan of Discourse and it’s “endless scrolling” method of browsing posts that can be seen on massive threads like this one. If anything, Discourse feels as if it was made to run a useless tech support forum as opposed to fostering a community.
Oh, and don’t get me started on trying to escape this by running an old forum program. I knew of people who did this back in the day, only to find their site defaced just as fast. Those old forum programs have numerous exploits, and you can find many exploits in old VB versions on the CVE database as one example. You have to actively make sure your forum is patched against new CVEs if you let your license expire or it’s revoked for any reason (which they can be, as a few XenForo owners have learned the hard way).
Spam attacks
Any active forum, then and now, is notorious for spam attacks. It’s not uncommon to have posts show up by some user advertising Rhino pills or some dodgy online casino you’ve never heard of to the point of flooding a badly moderated forum. These posts would be swept up fast on active forums with moderators trying to tell people not to even reply to make fun of them as it would summon more spambots. But a dead or dying forum will be flooded with these posts faster than a WordPress comment box can be spammed.
This has led to net negatives for users, from accounts being throttled to draconian measures to verify your account. I’ve had accounts on forums that are supposed to be manually approved where the moderators never got around to it. Another account on a forum I was on got locked out…with no DMs letting me know what I did wrong. I’m sure having that bad taste in your mouth definitely made people move away from forums. While forum spam is nowhere near as bad as imageboard spam with outright illegal content or threats being posted to declining/dead “altboards” (smaller English-speaking imageboards that are not 4chan), it will clog up dead sites.
On a related note, I’ve seen forums that also ended up going into full lockdown mode because of AI scrapers nailing their bandwidth and resources. It’s really nice to click a link on Google to a forum and see a login message.
Increasing Centralization
Perhaps the worst thing for forums is also a result of users leaving: it’s the increasing centralization of the internet. While this has been amplified for many reasons, from phoneposters relying on “apps” (tapatalk was infamous for this) to said users also only knowing a few “big” sites exist or mentally acting as such, it’s made worse with stuff such as the infamous Google Search on Reddit trick.
As Google goes down the tubes, the “hack” on searching with Google is to, I kid you not, search for it on Reddit. Google is loaded with SEO spam, AI results that get memed on for being inaccurate, and garbage posts, so people will try to look on the singular monolithic forum as a place to find answers to any question. Nevermind the fact that they’re low-quality as well due to the virtue of literally being Reddit of all places. People will do anything to try to make search better, and this involves using Reddit searching, and the masses tend to prefer a singular brand over a forum.
As a result, people being centralized on Reddit means that forums don’t even have a chance to compete with Reddit results except on “niche” topics.
On top of that, Discord and Reddit also have a “network effect”. With one account, you can instantly unlock tons of communities for any topic no matter how weird or niche it is, all in one spot. Just like how the barrier of entry to start using Discord in many servers is to “create a username and then an account without even downloading a program”, the barrier of entry to join a Discord or Reddit community is to simply click join server or start posting. So while Discord and Reddit might crack down on topics they don’t approve of compared to what got people into them in the first place, what keeps them going is their sheer size and how easy it is to start posting there. Meanwhile you have to find a forum on Google, make an account there, hope the account is approved, etc.
Chatrooms deprecating the forum
Another problem with forums and their lifeblood is that chatrooms tend to suck the life out of a forum; be it Discord groups or chatboxes. This is a systematic issue with forums: forums end up dying as the userbase moves either to the offsite Discord, or if the forum has a chatbox much discussion takes place there instead of the permanent record of a forum. It’s because chatrooms are addicting, fast paced methods of communication, and as a result the community naturally migrates there. It’s why a forum having a Discord or a chatbox in this day and age is suicide: especially if there’s no “counters” to discussion moving there all the time. In fact, I’ve seen imageboard threads frown upon Discord usage as it leads to off-site drama and thread inactivity. Even back in the day, IRC chats could also act as a breeding ground for off-site drama.
Many forums I know that are still active lack chatboxes for a reason, or they try to make sure it is not the emphasis of the site. Using an external chatroom for any forum is certainly something that hastens the death of a forum.
Millions of dead forums
The end result of all this is that tons of dead forums exist. While forum culture isn’t as dead as say, imageboard culture (where even the “active” site 4chan is plagued with so much spam and poor quality postings that right before the AI craze boomed there were people suspecting the site was flooded with AI spam, spawning the often-repeated “Dead Internet Theory“), many forums are dead or walking carcasses, with longtime users moving on or posting elsewhere online. As seen with online games, there’s a cascading effect. If a forum/community is merely perceived as dead, nobody will bother to care for or look into it because they heard from some guy it’s dead. But what is even worse is when someone gives it a try and sees that it is in fact dead.
Case in point, IRC has been dead for years. Ever since Discord popped up and IRC webchat boxes died (because of Java plugins dying, it being harder to ban someone with Mibbit due to how it “proxied”, etc.), IRC is dead. Furthering the death of IRC is the byzantine method of having to set up a bouncer, when something like XMPP, Matrix, or of course walled gardens like Discord have things like chat history in an age where everyone has a bunch of PCs and a phone. IRC at this point to the eyes of the average normie nerd can be summed up with the perception of “that one guy” insisting on using IRC, or as a chatroom service for boomers wanting to relive the glory days.
Of course, that’s not counting if the forum fell off the internet completely, like if the owner got sick of paying the hosting bill for a 10-year-old forum nobody posts to that just has memories that everyone no longer wants to remember. This even happens on the fediverse all the time as well, as the owner moves on and is left paying the bill or dealing with the instance going down.
Forums can still thrive though
Yet there are many forums that are still alive and kicking for many reasons. Most notably, these forums tend to offer something you look for. Niche topics still thrive on forums, along with established communities that don’t have terrible moderators or that offer things you cannot talk about on mainstream social media. You know, the exact reason social media ate the lunch of forums. There’s plenty of forums as well which only have users due to being “legacy” communities, where boomers from back in the day keep the place going. If there’s a niche topic involved where information can be found literally nowhere else, a forum can truly thrive. Pinside is one such example of a thriving topic-related forum. It has several recipes needed to have a thriving community. It has a well-made forum software that keeps the community engaged and acts as a community hub for this scene. If you want information on how to repair a Gottlieb System 80 pinball machine you found, you can ask away and you’ll get results or you can search for posts about the same issue.
Perhaps the coolest feature Pinside has are “key posts”, where editors on the site can mark very important posts that people are going to want to see, and essentially “sticky” them in a thread so people can be directed to them. For example; this thread on a pinball machine owner group has “key posts” bookmarked on fixing technical issues with the machine, and information about said pinball machine you’d think people would want to see if they see this thread for the first time so they’re not digging through a 90-page thread.
Furthermore, hosting a forum (due to the registration structure) is inherently less risky than hosting an imageboard or fedi instance. Hosting an imageboard is asking to get spammed with illegal content or “fedposts” if there is little in the way of moderation actively managing it at every single hour to purge said content. Even if you host a fedi instance, you HAVE to lock down the “whole network” view (which displays posts from other sites on yours) to unregistered users unless you want content you don’t want to host to pop up where anyone without an account can see it and disable new registrations (to stop spam attacks and bad actors). After all, not doing so is just asking to get booted from your host.
But you can run and curate a forum, you just need to be able to scale it properly (especially with moderation). You also have to keep up to date with security holes and all that fun stuff, to avoid a data breach like many forums of the past had. Yet, there are some examples of thriving forums (but they are time consuming to manage).
The “short” version
So, what have we learned here today from my stories? Well simple. While some of the factors in the deaths of forums were external, many were due to how forums were run. When you can’t have discussion, everyone will move to places they know about. Back in the day, these were other social media sites. Now with increasing censorship, people are moving to other sites to discuss things.
Forums cannot make the same mistakes that killed them from bad ownership, greed, and mismanagement. Some will continue, hampering discussion as they wonder why old users leave. I haven’t even gotten into some of the more “specific” aspects of forums, like some of them being associated with low-quality communities.
But most importantly, a forum needs to have a community to thrive. Forums weren’t thriving based on what software they run or what features they have, but rather the community they housed. People always use forums because of the community there. What keeps a forum going is the community, or people having a reason to go to the site. Forums that still thrive do for a few reasons: either they have a community that ONLY is centralized around such a place (with a backlog of posts) such as for some old computer or a specific car, they have a userbase that uses it as a giant chatroom and is kept afloat by oldheads posting, or they discuss something that is hard to discuss on the walled gardens and as a result it draws people in.
To thrive after this requires management that also knows what they’re doing. While this certainly applies to forums, this can apply to literally any website.
To end this post, I’ll basically bring up one more example of a site dying due to the hand of the owners: DeviantArt. DeviantArt was a really good art site for what it was. Sure, its reputation was nothing short of a meme and you could find tons of low-hanging fruit for the internet peanut gallery to laugh at. But it was a place you could post lots of stuff on, from winamp skins and Windowblinds themes to photography to fanfics to many different kinds of art. The staff would even feature art they liked.
Then the site was sold to Wix, who proceeded to change the UI to ripoff artstation, installed aggressively ban happy moderators, added AI stuff literally nobody asked for and allowed AI “art”, and most importantly caused a userbase exodus. Where did they go? That’s right, social media.
By selling the site out under the userbase, the owners would run a successful site into the ground. This followed by the community leaving and rage deleting art led DeviantArt to be a shell of its former self.
Essentially; the point I’m making is: a forum needs good staff and moderation, and a community to thrive. Having software that isn’t trash is a plus, but forums can thrive even on the jankiest of software as SomethingAwful or all the boards running something like acmlm have shown. Both having a community that’s stable and not “crazy” and moderation that curates the community and wrangles the worst of it (without powertripping) are important.
The shorter version
Basically, a forum with good staff and a niche that draws in people leads to a forum with a good community, and when you combine that with forum software that doesn’t suck (like Discourse does) you have a winning combination.
fueling the fight every day of the week