So, has an "Established" messageboard ever failed because the posters all left?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m not going to link to any threads or anything like that as that would detract from the point of what I’m wondering here, but I will admit this thread is partly inspired by the current Changes and peoples reactions thereof.

People have been announcing the “End of the Boards” for ages, but with the possible exception of the current Silliness, most people accept that whatever people are getting worked up about will eventually blow over and everything will return to normal (or an approximation thereof) and generally that’s what happens. It’s not unique to these boards- most forums I’ve participated in for any length of time experience it.

But, I wondered today, are there examples of “Established” messageboards (ie ones that have been around for a while, with a respectable number of posters, decent post turnover, etc) that have suddenly and dramatically been abandoned or failed because of poster departures?

I’m not thinking of boards aimed at “time-diminished” things like non-classic computer games or movies (where people just lose interest and drift away once the forum’s focus is no longer The Latest Thing), but more a messageboard devoted to, say 8-Track Tape Machines (collecting, restoration, appreciation etc) or something like that. In other words, A fairly stable board that has a moderately (or greater) active community, except one day- or over a short but noticeable period of time- Something Happens and the majority of the contributing posters (or at least the “influential” ones) leave.

Maybe the Moderation was too heavy-handed. Maybe someone called someone else an Unrepeatable Thing, and the board devolved into a massive Flame War that drove everyone away. Maybe the board’s Font Of All Knowledge And Wisdom found another hobby or stopped posting for whatever reason, and without their input the board just stagnated and faded away. Or maybe another board with a similar focus but a different “culture” started up and people migrated there en masse. Whatever the reason, a once vibrant and established messageboard went from being vibrant and established to being the Internet Discussion Board equivalent of somewhere like North Haverbrook after the Monorail.

I’m not really looking for messageboards that failed due to lack of interest in the topic or “focus” of the boards- the Internet is full of those. What I’m wondering about are messageboards that underwent a Change or an Event and were either reduced to a semi-inhabited ghost-town version of themselves, or failed completely and were abandoned.

Has anyone here been part of one of those boards? What happened, and at what point did you realise the board was failing and depart yourself? And could any of it have been averted?

2

There was the entire Prodigy service, after AOL blanketed the entire Western world with startup floppies and far better service. AOL understood the power of numbers; Prodigy thought of customers as costs and distractions. Their message boards were the last to die, because of the sense of community that had built up, but it was inevitable.

The penetration of the Tubes is now such that it couldn’t happen that way, though. There is no gateway control anymore.

3

The Tubes? What are they?

I remember Prodigy, thats a good example. I think from my own point of view and in terms of this message board - this is probably one of the most well established boards. And I don’t think a mass exodus will end anything there. IMHO of course, people could start on something somewhere that could support massive influxes of people and it could take off…but this one is an oldy but goody so we’ll see how depe these roots lie. Personally, I think the changes are livable, I never spent much time in the pit anyway. But start tying peoples hands and someone is bound to object…

4

A number of MSN boards failed due to loss of membership, but I would not say they were well established. They had been there for a while but never a lot of contributing members.

5

Humorous reference to the “Intertubes”, itself a joking reference to the internet. “Teh intertubes ru1e; teh AOL is suxx0r” and all that.

6

I remember years ago on another board I frequent that there was in influx of new members from the Ask Jeeves boards when they changed format. I recall that they lost most of their members.

7

It kind of sucks tho’ when you think about it. Messege boards (not just this one but all of them) are like a dictatorship. No matter how many people disagree with the rules; it’s members are obligated to follow them. (Or leave of course)

8

My only experience with anything like this was with a Buddhist board I used to frequent. The administrators took a strict “no moderation” stance, allowing for all kinds of interesting subjects to post… Lyrics to a poem, a rant about coping with anger, irreverent questions about sex… Anything was allowed. Then one troll with an axe to grind literally ruined everything. He was a former Buddhist, present-day Wiccan who devoted all his time to insulting other posters and expounding on why being a Wiccan was the only reasonable choice. Since he had once been a valued member, people were reluctant to can him. There arose two factions, those clamoring for moderation and those insisting we had to use it as a lesson to teach us about acceptance. Nobody banned the fucker, and last time I checked the board was a pathetic mess still dancing to the whims of this one arrogant jackass troll. I did learn a valuable lesson though… Buddhism is no excuse to dodge responsibility or passively accept abuse. What was once a truly unique, beautiful place lies in ruins due to some stubborn mod’s cowardice.

9

If a board has dictatorial moderation it can survive quite nicely as long as everyone understands the rules and they are evenhandedly applied. A board with almost no moderation can also survive but it’s a much more delicate thing as they are subject to being torn apart by trolls.

The biggest problem most boards have is not too much or too little moderation, but inconsistent moderation where what’s a hand slap one day is a banning the next, depending on the whims of the moderator on duty. Another problem is that some long term users tend to get proprietary about the way a board is managed and almost come to view it as their personal property since they devote so much time to it, or feel they have some direct say in the management of the board.

Most message boards are charity cases or damn close to it. Some boards have be able to monetize their services, but they are few. Sometimes people need to step back and realize some sense of gratitude for the playground they are being given by the board ownership and the unpaid time the mods contribute to referee what amount to adult sissy slap fights.

10

Most usenet boards have basically been overrun by spam, even those that were quite vibrant back in the day. Most of those boards are completely unmoderated, although there are moderated boards as well. A lot of people have just drifted off over time, and most internet users today don’t know what usenet is, so new blood is quite unlikely.

It is nice to have a lightly moderated board that keeps away the spam and the obvious trolls, because no matter how tight and interested a usenet board’s populace is, if it’s not a moderated board, there’s not much you can do about spam and trolls other than ignore them.

11

Series of tubes.

12

“Hey Joey, look at the fuckin’ tube!” - Carlin

13

I’ve watched an established message board self-destruct in the space of a few months.

Stop me if this sounds familiar in any way - board goes pay-to-post around 2003 in an attempt to boost revenue. Free alternatives start to appear, and membership slowly starts to dwindle and stagnate to a core group of regulars… so a couple of years ago, the owner decides as a last resort to go free again (in this case, the paid-up members got nothing except for a pat on the head).

Shortly after the switch, one of the cliques has a falling out and two relationships involving regular posters break up and turn into spectacular trainwrecks on the boards.

Here’s what they did differently, though…

Around the same time, the moderators disappear, so the flame wars go completely unchecked, and trolls begin to take advantage of free posting to the point that socks soon outnumber the real posters. It was like reading through page after page of BBQ Pit, only worse. And the banner ads… let’s just say I’ve seen more tasteful on sites specialising in questionable content.

Within six months of the meltdown, most of the posters who had anything interesting to say had left for greener pastures.

That was a year ago. Last I checked, the boards are still limping along, but these days it’s the same ten members posting variations on the same ten threads day. Even the parent site (a dating site, of all things) has pretty much died off… it’s nothing but fake profiles for trolls, Nigerian scammers, Russian “internet brides”, some trailer trash who can’t afford the pay dating sites and the occasional hapless shmo who thinks he can find love on that joke of a site.

I’m really hoping that the SDMB isn’t headed down the same path. I’d miss it terribly. :frowning:

14

Same thing happened to a music discussion Usenet group I used to belong to. It was technically well run - all posts went to a moderator, spam was filtered out, the content was sent to a digest. But the founder of the group was a hard-liner on “free discussion” and one troll managed to drive off virtually all the other posters. It literally got down to the founder, the troll and about five other posters who had the stomach for the troll. All the rest of the contributors have moved to web discussion boards and all of them have banned the troll.

Sadly, none of the web discussion boards are anywhere near as good as the Usenet one pre-troll.

15

One of my LiveJournal friends was just mentioning this the other day–about how a long-running car-related message board with a large close knit membership (similar to the Dope, it sounded like–they talked about a lot more than cars) became a ghost town after the company that ran it brought in a new moderator who chose to deal with any thread that somebody complained about by deleting the entire thread (not just the offending post). She was warned about it by the membership but chose to exercise her authority–so almost all the regular posters left, got some money together, and formed their own virtually identical board with democratically elected moderators. From what he says, the old board, which used to get dozens of posts a day, now barely gets a handful.

16

It was much smaller than this place-but I saw a pretty well-travelled messageboard devoted to travel go downhill, splinter and then the splinters splintered after the original owner sold the website and many of the regular posters left and moved on with their lives. Actually, one of the long-time posters on that board was on the one who clued me into the SD…clairobscur, if he’s still around.

17

I left a usenet group (alt.rec.bicycles.recumbents) and went to a web-based message board after I realized most of the prominent posters had done so. I seem to recall there were a few notorious trolls who motivated many of us to make this switch.

18

We did a project for a client that was a sort of blog-cum-messageboard amalgamation. The site was set up as a way to feature some dynamite comedy writing and then people were allowed to comment on the articles in message board style (as in you could just click through to the “message board” which was just a list of OPs that were articles and then comments beneath it).

Anyway, the site was getting tons of traffic, so much that we had to put it on its own server. They had fresh content every day. Every article had hundreds of replies (usually going off-topic after the first dozen or so). Sometimes their articles would get picked up by Digg or even a popular news outlet and they’d get tons more traffic.

The people who signed up to post were crazy about posting. It was almost like a large fraternity, full of inside jokes.

At some point, though, new material got more scarce and the stuff that did get published was sort of crap. The posters rebelled by just flat out saying they were leaving. I am pretty sure someone started their own “splinter board” but they did not post the URL on the site - they shared between themselves.

It was a wild ride while it lasted but it just did not have the stamina to keep itself going. I think it went on for 2 years before it died.

19

The message board for my Alma Mater on the Scout.com site had a huge split a couple of years ago. They had a paid editor who wrote and gathered content for the site and did some of the moderation for the message board. When one editor left, they inexplicably hired a numbnut who was a fan of a different school, who was also a bad writer, an outspoken evangelical, and lazy.

His judgemental posts and deleting of anything even hinting at sex or drug use or drinking caused a huge split in the community and one poster started his own board and invited a few posters over to it. Those posters invited more, and it became a self-selected group of smart and rational people many of whom had good inside knowledge of the sports programs at the University. The old board dumbed down quickly as more people left, and the new one grew exponentially. They both get equal traffic these days, but if it weren’t for the built in advantage of being a part of the Scout.com empire, the old message board would barely exist.

20

The “Greedy Associates” law-firm complaint boards have largely died. Several factors: The original generation of posters aged out of that point in their careers without successors moving in; blogs about law firm life began to fill this niche; and the worklife/salary environment has changed drastically with the economy.