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Internet forums are disappearing because now it's all Reddit and Discord. And that's worrying. (www.xataka.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 99 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I tried running a forum.... With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn... And I followed best practices to set it up.

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  • [–] 108 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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.

        1998 |   6686
    1999 |  40528
    2000 |  70379
    2001 |  41129
    2002 | 171294
    2003 | 203642
    2004 | 204685
    2005 | 173659
    2006 | 150000
    2007 | 135936
    2008 | 126283
    2009 |  94894
    2010 |  70333
    2011 |  48691
    2012 |  31197
    2013 |  30606
    2014 |  30227
    2015 |  29334
    2016 |  25472
    2017 |  27505
    2018 |  28551
    2019 |  22366
    2020 |  17250
    2021 |  12794
    2022 |  10135
    2023 |   7151

    If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    From your stats, it's clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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/

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago*

    I haven't run a BB forum for probably well over 15 years but in my experience the best thing was to just limit the ability to post for 24 hours after the account is being created (that makes getting caught and banned a bit more of a pain point because they have to wait 24 hours before they can do anything again) combined with just blocking Russian and Chinese IP addresses.

    It's surprising how much rubbish that stops.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    And I followed best practices to set it up.

    Including email confirmation for registering accounts, post limits for new accounts, initially being allowed only to the entry area where one has to post and introduce themselves to be allowed elsewhere?

    In my childhood these were the basics.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well that's still better than the weird Indian witch doctor spam I see on a couple of forums I visit.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It's always fake passport scams that I get, where they will offer people fake passports but of course they don't actually have any capacity to make them, so they just take your money. Is there really a massive demand for fake passports all of a sudden?

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