Driven Forum

[ldm68]

Not sure if this is the right place to post or to be honest if it is worth doing?

My forum can be found here and to has been a little forgotten both by users, of which there were never many but also me! Are forums like this a thing of the past? has the world moved on? I admit it is looking a little old and tired these days but please have a look and any advice on how to improve it or save it would be appreciated. I dont really want it to just die completely but maybe it already has!


driven.boards.net/

[🎶Sossity🎶]

Hi🙂
If you’ve not already done so, You can try asking here for  opinions and tips.

[Kami]

Apr 12, 2023 5:50:59 GMT -8 ldm68 said:

Not sure if this is the right place to post or to be honest if it is worth doing?

My forum can be found here and to has been a little forgotten both by users, of which there were never many but also me! Are forums like this a thing of the past? has the world moved on? I admit it is looking a little old and tired these days but please have a look and any advice on how to improve it or save it would be appreciated. I dont really want it to just die completely but maybe it already has!

So if you want to get reviews / suggestions on your forum specifically, you need to post in the "Get Opinions About Your Forum" section — make sure to include a link to your forum in the post + a short synopsis of what kind of feedback you want to receive.

For the other part of this though, forums broadly speaking are no longer as popular as they once were. With social media, instant-communication platforms like Discord (which allows you to also build communities), and so on, forums have become a bit more niche (though some of the latest data shows folks partially returning to forums with how some social media platforms are currently handling their business).

That said, people still ARE using forums. A bigger problem than forums being less popular is actually the age of the internet. In Ye Olden Days of forum popularity, you were competing with far fewer forums for any given topic, and it was harder to find communities (which is why things like site affiliation exchanges exist currently, or things like web rings) because search engines weren't as advanced or populated with results for a given topic, starting a forum community was bound to lead to results as word of mouth / affiliation were the only real places you could find websites.

Now however, in a fraction of a second, you can get millions of results on a topic or search term; newer forums, or forums that have a broad ("general" forums, "pet" forums, etc) topic, struggle against results of older, more established communities that have higher rankings on search results.

While I would no longer say "if you build it they will come", I will say if you have a clear topic and purpose for the forum, a non-basic forum appearance, and keep trying with active advertising and being active in other forum communities with a link to your forum in your signature so it can be indexed by search engine bots as a "genuine" site, you should see some measure of mild success — RP forums, as a for instance, are still quite popular (not as popular as they once were, but more popular than other forum topic genres).

Ultimately, whether or not it is "worth" having a forum is entirely up to you and how you measure worthiness. I am still here and my forum usage will last until I die or forums stop existing whichever comes first. That's me though, so you have to decide whether the effort is worth it for you.