I think the main issue with forums is that they're just not reliable communities.
With so many forums popping up, it's extremely hard to stay dedicated in a new community. I have joined one forum in the last year (maybe more), and it's CodeForum.org - a forum advertised here on FP.
I only joined because the administrator messaged me a few times & replied to some of my threads here on FP. I was extremely hesitant to join because I have joined plenty of new forums in the past just to see them disband months or a year later. I prefer communities that are open for years and years - like FP, HackForums, or Reddit (similar to a forum).
There needs to be a way to modernize forums so that they don't just disappear.
I think one way to do that is with single sign on, so that even if a forum goes under, an account can still have a history of their content & replies... but even that needs some work and 99% of single sign on tools don't actually store data separate from the forum host, so if the forum dies or disappears you lose all of your content... it's a shame.
Perhaps the right fix for forums would be to have a forum network, where users can create their own forums (like subreddits on Reddit.com), but all of the posts funnel into a central area (reddit.com/r/all for example). This gives forum owners (subreddit owners) some control over the content & users, but doesn't allow them to delete your account / account history when they shut their forum (or subreddit) down. I think we need a solution similar to this for forums. Perhaps starting a MyBB forum should allow you to manage permissions, rules, and content, but actually store all of the data on a central MyBB server so that even if you decide to close down your forum, all of the content is still displayed on the main MyBB forum which would have hundreds of categories that you can link up to your forum. This is 100% possible, but does take away some control from forum owners... but the benefit is there for users because they are not at risk of losing all of their content when the forum owner decides to abandon the project.
However, in current times we do not have a reliable solution like this, so the right way to run a forum for a long time is to...
- make sure financials don't affect your forum's availability (buy hosting a year in advance, renew domain names, save money for your forum in advance, etc)
- do not go weeks or even days without sharing content & replying to threads on your forum
- only have as many staff as you truly need, to avoid a weird ratio of staff to normal members
- only have staff members who are active, replace inactive staff members
- continue to advertise the forum even when it is active. a new set of fresh members is how a forum survives for years.
There's many things that can be mentioned here, but I want to focus on that last point.
I was part of a forum called Cerjam, and I have mentioned it here on FP and across the internet several times.
This site was run by an old hoarder named Chris, and it was pretty successful for years. With hundreds of thousands of posts about hacking, AIM/AOL, graphics, politics, and more, it was a hub for some of the most famous hackers around. It was loads of fun, especially with private forums only available to long time members... However, new members stopped coming in because the theme was outdated, the admin (Cerjam/Chris) stopped caring as much, and there was no advertising. Little by little, long time members stopped showing up - whether it was because they matured, were arrested for hacking, or simply didn't care for the community anymore. I spent hundreds of hours there, as did many others. Now the website is completely shut down and Chris' social accounts are inactive. It's speculated that he actually passed away and the website just remained active until all the hosting/domains expired. If Chris had spent time getting new members, it would have been a lot more active - instead of fizzling out years ago and surviving on as little as 10-20 new posts per day. There was a time when it received hundreds to 1000+ posts in a day. If Chris had brought in staff members (he didn't for the last 4-5 years of the site), it probably would have continued. And whether he's dead or not, if he had handled the financials better then the site would not have gone down - especially if he had someone else involved with the project who could have continued it.
Anyways, I look at Cerjam as the best example that I know of (besides things like Di.gg, Friendster, Myspace) for a website that was pretty darn active & then died because of admin inactivity / not caring / thinking the forum would never die. It was literally the first forum I joined & I made thousands of posts there. I was even banned, started a new account (with admin permission), and racked up another 1000+ posts. Then I was banned again because I released the full name / phone number / address of the admin Chris (oops), but he unbanned me later because I revealed to him how I got the information. The point is that this was the very first forum I joined, and the very first time I experienced a website completely dying out after years of success. And it really came down to those points above - Financials affected the site, the admin would go extended periods of times without updating the site or sharing content, the staff members disappeared, the site stopped being advertised, and with a few other issues... the site disappeared.
