I don't know who all is familiar with VerticalScope, but it is the company that owns over a thousand communities, including TAZ. VerticalScope is the parent company, but then Fora is the name that you'd typically see in the footer of all of these different forums that they own. If you've owned/operated an established forum, you've probably had VerticalScope try and acquire your forum at some point in time. It's what they do.
It would seem they were playing the long game with all of these forum acquisitions, as now they've recently updated the Fora homepage. It appears to be a rip off of Reddit. The idea is that Fora will be a Reddit-like feed of all of their forums, and perhaps they'll eventually drop the standalone forums and have it all under the Fora site. I'm very curious to see how this plays out. Does it end with all of these communities being gone?
I think it's a great idea. Something that I've had in mind for a very long time for ForumSpark, which ended up in our version here: https://forumspark.net/hub
I took a bit of inspiration from Fora, the popular communities block for example, but I didn't want to blatantly copy Reddit.
I think we need to support fellow communities the best we can. Providing a social media around these forums is a great asset to any board owner.
I'm honestly not a fan of this at all. I like Reddit don't get me wrong, but forcing these communities that were once forums turn into a message board like Reddit doesn't look great at all. It looks boring just like every major social media platform these days. Edit: I had no clue that they still have a link to the official forums they own. I thought they were just converted to a Reddit like clone oops. Still I wonder if and when they'll close those forums and strictly make them turn into Foro communities?
I'm going to be completely honest and probably somewhat controversial. Up until today I took a very dim view of VerticalScope on multiple levels, far too many to detail here. I'm also not a particular fan of Xenforo. I think in general it's outdated, held back by a desktop mentality.
It's obvious to me at least that in order to compete with other forms of social media forums need to unite behind an app built primarily for smart devices using a common interface. The one area forums have over other platforms is that the content is enduring as opposed to the disposable nature of Facebook content and the like. This needs to be exploited and VerticalScope appear to have taken the first positive step in that direction.
I'll be watching to this how this pans out with great interest.
