Kind of like ghost towns in a way. I was recently trying to find a message board on some rather obscure topic (which escapes my absent mind now)-just an idle search, nothing more. I stumbled across a board which seemed to have lots of traffic, and the subforums were logically named and organized. I clicked on one subforum, and was immediately confronted with nothing but spam posts as far as the eye could see-not a single legitimate poster was to be found.
This seemed pretty amazing to me-did the original mods just lose the good fight against the spammers, and bugged out of there to a new board to start over? Why didn’t they shut down the old one, when they instead apparently kept it running on autopilot, unmanned and neglected, apparently forgotten by the community it used to serve?
Today I discovered the “help” button in our property management accounting software doesn’t work any more. So I thought I’d check out the message board for the system. Now, it had been, well, sparsely populated when I first Googled the software, but hey, maybe things had changed since then.
What usually happens, at least in my experience, is that the community slowly dies off. Communities need a certain critical mass to keep going, and there’s almost always a level of attrition. Therefore, without a constant influx of new members, eventually the forum is likely to die off if it doesn’t have an extremely dedicated core userbase.
Occasionally, there’s a forum revolution. These are exceptionally rare to witness, as they’re usually spur of the moment. A gaming site that I frequent had this happen, it was all great fun. We’re a bunch of flaky bastards anyway.
What happened was we were all decent friends, played an MMORPG with a very strong tendency towards grouping, and most of us were active on the forums. After a time, some of us realized that we were spending as much time ont he forums as in game, so we split off. The main forum for our server in the game stayed active (although not nearly as colorful). We went to our little Gamers in Exile (not the real name of the forum), and partied there for a while. We stayed there (even through a name change or two) and the forum grew in popularity.
Well, the forum owner decided to sell the forum to an outsider without offering any of us a purchase option (not that we’d’ve taken it, he charged over a grand), and being the cliquey sons of bitches we are, we’d have none of it. So one of us registered a domain, pointed to his private DNS and now we live on a server in his garage.
The Gamers in Exile domain is pretty much abandoned. Each and every forum is filled with spammers, 2 pages deep.
I am/was a member of a message board that just faded away. It was a Magic: The Gathering site that’s main focus was to sell cards with a message board on the side so perhaps it was doomed from the beginning. People went to the site to buy cards, not talk strategy, there were far superior message boards for that.
I completely stopped going, but apparently they kept my e-mail address because a few months ago I got an e-mail from the place requesting I come back! The e-mail detailed their newly renovated message board and talk about how message boards need people to thrive and they were inviting me back, with my old username and password and everything.
I didn’t return as I am mostly out of the MTG scene anyways now.
I’ve been on many message boards over the years & have seen a few of them dry up. One of them went south right before the couple who were the board’s admins broke up. Don’t know what ever happened to the board after that; I can’t even find it now.
