Up front: I had a major wobble last year. I had a roleplay forum that, ultimately, catastrophically collapsed owing to the fact that there was a hugely poisonous influence in the community that should have been excised like one would treat an invader: ruthlessly with strict boundaries and a hard wall. But, alas, I did not. It had never happened to me before that such a terminal thing had occurred - but as a roleplay space it was smaller than others I'd had in the past.
But I want to address some of the other comments above, and I will - I promise - get back to the point after.
So I think the 'death of forums' shtick has been dramatically overplayed by those who don't understand the changing of the tides.
There was a time when it felt like wall-to-wall forums. Forums were everywhere. And that was in some ways a good thing - but what people coming to the party now and looking at it don't realise, not only was that a time before 'the socials' came along, it was also a time when other tools didn't exist and forums were basically all there was to bring people together.
Say what you will about Discord but there's a reason gaming groups flocked to it - when you're organising a gaming event, especially if it's something like a raid in WoW or GW2 or whatever, you not only want a tool that brings everyone under one roof and can notify people but also do the voice chat for completely synchronous communication across the group (i.e. the raid leader shouting instructions/encouragement). And if you want something with an integrated calendar, there's always Guilded as an alternative.
IOW, what we've seen in recent years is partially a shift rebalancing away from forums because 'when all you have is a forum, every problem looks like a forum-shaped hole'. So forums will *never* return to the halcyon dates. But you know what? On some level that's a *good* thing because it means for some of the things that were once forums, there are now better tools for things that would once have been forums.
Now, that's not the whole story. There has never been a shortage of people wanting a place, or a space, to soapbox and build an audience around them. At one time this was a space half occupied by forums, but then blogs came along, and of course, then came 'the socials'. These were, and are, spaces where people can post and be the stars in their own shows, where the audience is not on equal footing, at least notionally. On a forum, of course, everyone can start a topic (by default) and no-one is *special*, but on a blog and on the socials, it's your world, even if it's shared by others. So there's that - another natural gravitation away from forums.
And then, of course, we have the fact that the forum environment doesn't bode entirely well for the discovery of content. That's the one thing that social media does rather well: yes, people might be the star of their own space, but their space is necessarily shared - and as a result you're one foot into the complete collection of content available at a flick or a button press, so there is inherent need to curate what you see to keep you coming back, to show you all those ads. The socials, of course, don't care about you, just your patronage.
And of course, probably more importantly, the golden age of forums was during a period where there were fewer people online. Those that were online were much more into the hobbyist arena for their relevant interests.
But once you actually stop and look: the people who are still using forums are the people who were always using forums - and everyone else just came and left around us. We bemoan the loss of users to the socials but they were never ours, as it were. They weren't forum users to begin with - so we haven't lost anything.
So that just leaves how we manage forums in the meantime. Forums are in a weird place; there is a latent changing of the guard, you have the old guard, the phpBBs, the MyBBs, the SMFs of the world. You have the new guard, the Discourses, the Flarums, the NodeBBs. They're not reinventing the format, not a generational step; charitably we might call it a half step. But the forum format isn't moving.
Now, that's not a *bad* thing, per se - forums are a known quantity. We know how they behave. We know how they operate, we know when they work and we know when they're not the tool for the job. But that's also not a *good* thing because there are deficiencies in the format. There are distinct, known issues for certain types of communities - where types of content are siloed; where we bury media in a gallery, articles in a collection, and we separate them from the forum.
This is where the forum format needs some love - because the forum mindset is the purely textual conversations of old, but the world has moved on. The people who are on the fringes of forums, the ones who might join us in our spaces, they have seen social media and expect easier-to-use things (especially around media) than we currently have. This is definitely a place and a space to move the forum world forward - and yet no-one is particularly interested in doing so, for a variety of reasons.
Why do I say all this? Well, to get - eventually - back to the point of this thread, this has made me lose confidence in our ability, collectively, to build communities. People come with higher expectations now, and it's harder than ever to meet those expectations. People expect better tools to support them and I fear we are not keeping up, and I fear even more that no-one is interested in fixing this situation.
I've thought about putting my hat in the ring - I certainly have thoughts on what I'd do as a forum platform from scratch but I don't know if I want to put myself through that, it's hard enough doing something out in a space that is evolutionary not revolutionary. But I think that's the only way to realistically help people regain the vibe we used to have around forums, and for people to have faith in them again as a vehicle for building communities.
