Discuss the state of the forums and find solutions

[Zkuq]

I think one of the problems forums are facing is probably that people themselves have changed. Everything moves at a faster pace, things don't stay around for long, and that's what people seem to like and expect as well. And it's probably not just younger people, many of us 'older' people have probably also come to expect that. I think that's also somewhat related to persistence, which is something I also often see on forums: long-living threads revolving around certain subjects, but I certainly wouldn't expect to see that on most social media platforms. I guess things such as subreddits and Discord channels are reminiscent of persistent threads, but at the same time, they feel very different.

Curiously there are still some fairly active forums however. I personally use a relatively new (est. 2016) Finnish forum (I'm Finnish), and I find it quite active still. But even that's a special case: It was spawned off of its creators' previous site/forum, which... ran into an unfortunate fate, and the userbase largely followed the creators to the new site/forum. But still, the audience is there, if you can somehow grab it. I don't don't know how. Maybe you'd need a strong incentive of some sort, but that's usually easier said than done.

Ryuu mentioned coding work. I'm capable myself, but I deal with enough technical debt that I don't want any more of that if I can avoid it, and as much as I like the community here, I'm very hesitant to throw in free work for a site owner that doesn't seem to care at all about the site (especially when free time isn't something I have an abundance of). I mean, I'm thankful for the site at least existing, but other than that, not great. I think I've also seen someone else mention software development work relatively recently, but I couldn't tell you who or where exactly even if I wanted to (my memory just isn't that great). But at least there should be some technically capable people here still!