Re: Are forums dead?
Reply #1 –
ehhh.... it's a question asked several times in the last years.
For sure forums are not as active as they used to be, and I think for multiple reasons. For example it's terribly easy to start a new forum, so any disagreement in any community leads to a new competing forum, the users split and the overall activity decreases. For chit chat, people like to be able to reach the biggest amount of other people in a single shot, so for that places like facebook are better without any doubt (all the "friends" are annoyed by any thing anyone posts). Generic support has now stackoverflow and all the variation, where you can find tons of people willing to post to increase their scores.
In other words, where once upon a time forums were the only available tool, not there are several alternatives as good as forums for the "end user".
To give you my own answer to the question, forum should be able to change. Probably not so much as Discourse and alike (otherwise it may be that what you are looking at is no more a forum, but something else), but at least in a way to engage more the members and give guests some added value to register multiple times, instead to register to a single FB/Twitter/etc..
Of course this is not easy, because each forum is run by a different admin, that has different opinions on how to run a community, and is rather sure his way is the correct one (either limiting the access to content, or running tons of ads, or banning anyone disagreeing with the admin, etc.).
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