Forum Discussion

Discussion in 'Miscellaneous' started by 607, Nov 3, 2019.

?

What's your forum experience besides EMC?

I've been registered on other forums before I joined EMC (or just one). 7 vote(s) 41.2%
I'm not registered on forums besides EMC. 7 vote(s) 41.2%
I joined other forums after I joined EMC (or just one). 3 vote(s) 17.6%
  1. Hi, it's me again!

    Online forums may be my favourite thing about the internet. However, although they are still a lot more prominent than BBS's or Usenet groups, it seems that internet forums, or message boards, are quite out of fashion.
    I would like to know what your experience is with forums, both long ago and now. The poll is hopefully a good conversation-starter.
    I have had the idea for a general thread asking about forum experience earlier, but I got the idea of asking about this more recently, when I looked in the EMC official Discord server, and saw a new member. I remarked I wasn't able to find him on the forum, and he replied he hadn't joined, and didn't intend to. When I asked him why (and he finally understood the question), he responded that he already had the Discord app installed anyway, and he didn't want to need a web browser open. This greatly surprised me, but I wonder if there are more people who feel that way! Or, related but slightly different, people who don't feel like registering because they'll have to think of a new password, and don't have a good system for that, while on Discord they only need one account.
    It's unlikely that any of you will have similar sentiments to that guy on Discord, as otherwise you wouldn't be here. ;) But I thought this would be an interesting discussion! Please do answer the poll, and if you have anything to say about your experience with forums, please do so! This is not only for discussion of the popularity of forums, but also for reminiscing about forums you were at 10 years ago :) (for example). I will write about my own experiences later.
    luckycordel and Jelle68 like this.
  2. Personally, I have been getting into more and more internet forums as of late. All of which are, let's say, not truely EMC-shareble. (Bible Discussions & Social Meetings :rolleyes: ) That means that: for me, they don't seem be be slowing down as a whole. Most of thease comunities are really caring and thoughtfull as a whole, and even provide a feeling of "family" that I would call superiour of that of EMC.
    It rather feels like the "younger people" aren't so much into forums anymore. It's really something of our generation, I think. Minecraft still is a game played by either 30 year-olds and 12 year-olds and neither of thease two are really "forum people," at least not in my experience. Most of us "forum kids" are between 19 and 29, I think to observe.

    It probably heavely depends on the type of forums you are on. Some things just go better via discord (arguebly a site like that of EMC does, though I do not argree) and others just die out because of less and less people are interested. I don't have that problem, and nowadays usually find myself in growing comunities rather than shrinking ones, which shapes my experience of "forums" as a consept, and you may have found yourself in dying comunities, and have had that change your idea of how active forums usually are.

    I will say though that most of it is more centeralised. Rather than one new small message board for once niece interest, there is one large forum that has all sorts of subspaces, most pupulair one being reddit. I don't see as a decrease in forum usage, but as an evolution of it. :)
    607 and luckycordel like this.
  3. I've been on other forums before I've been on EMC's own forums. ;)
    luckycordel likes this.
  4. EMC is the only forum I am apart of, I sometimes view some others but its very rare.
    607 and luckycordel like this.
  5. EMC is the only minecraft related forum I'm apart of, I was apart of a automotive forum but it no longer exist.
    Years ago and I mean years ago around 1989. I dabbled with dial up bulletin boards. Boy was that fun!:D
    607 likes this.
  6. I don’t think forums on their own are popular anymore. But subreddits (all 138,000 of them) are forums that you don’t have to buy a domain name or server for, and Reddit is the eighteenth most visited website in the world and has approximately 330 million users - with around 210 million of them between the ages of 18 and 30. So in that way, they certainly are still popular, but as with many aspects of the internet over the last several years, one company/website has a monopoly over them.

    I personally am involved with the EMC forum and occasionally Caudata.org, a forum for owners of caudates (newts, salamanders, etc.) when I need help with my axolotl. Most of my activity is on Reddit though, where I’m active in: r/gaming, r/deepfriedmemes, r/freefolk, r/thewalkingdead, r/worldnews, r/casualuk, r/ukpolitics, r/music and r/The1975.
    607 likes this.
  7. I got a long history with forums. I've been part of a old Naruto forum which was my first forum experience. I've been on forums for the Sims game, Doctor Who, and ChickenSmoothie. I once ran my own Star Trek forum called Terok Nor Promenade (now defunct). Then I spent 3-4 years as a member and then moderator for a Pottermore/Harry Potter forum called Pottermore Fan Forum (now defunct).

    Currently the forums I'm a part of now are EMC and Flight Rising.
    607 likes this.
  8. Thanks for the replies!

    Reddit is a good point. That may be a bigger 'competitor' to independent boards than Discord is. I didn't think much of it, because I personally haven't made more than a few posts on Reddit.
    This is an interesting observation, as mine quite disagrees with it. I think forums are really something of the previous generation. In my experience, most forum users are 30 and up.
    But that may also be a matter of this:
    You have a point here. Many forums I am a part of are dedicated to games or technology from the '90s. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that there are few young users there. :rolleyes:

    Thanks for this explanation. I can see that a subreddit would be closer to an internet forum than a Discord server, but still it seems wildly different. I haven't 'infiltrated' into any subreddit's communities, though, so I can't tell from the inside. ;)
    Jelle68 likes this.
  9. Some larger subreddits don't feel any different than other forums, where I mainly use thease as an example. Yes, the technology is a bit different, but the use cases and player interaction goes in what basically is the exact same way. Maybe not the picture-based ones, but deffinetly the text-based ones, which I tent to like better. Really, just inflitrate in them. :p

    I will say that there is one large difference between subreddits and forums: there are more "bullies" on reddit.
    I have been a fan of the work of Anita Sarkeesean, Natelie Wynn and, for example, Oliver Thorn for while now. In other words: I quite like the "SJW" site of youtube. There are, of course, quite a lot of people who disargree, and, sadly, that means most posts and such get inflitrated with the wrong kinds of people. That is to say: the activety of the people who dislike the thing the forum is for starts becoming the majorety. (If you look up "femmenist" on youtube most suggestions are "femmenist crige compilations" and "femenists are stupid videos")
    This is especially noticeble in the Transgender communities, where most people simeply want to talk about their experiences, but instead ed up getting spammed by people who think they can debate them on weather or not they (Trans people) exist, which, of course, is not what they're there for to do. This is not so much a problem with more "old school" forums, which most of those communeties ended up using anyway.
    Luckly enough, this isn't the case for most interests, especially unknown ones. In all those cases, reddit can feel like a normal forum, but when your group starts hitting the meanstream media, there might be chaos on the horizon.
    607 likes this.
  10. In my many long years of Internet (but i am NOT old, ok?) I have been on a lot and a lot of forums, depending on what i was interested in at that moment, to exchange with people bearing the same interests.
    The only forums I have been on since forever (more than 10 years) are the RR forums (Royaumes Renaissants) : a heavily-roleplay-historical game where the roleplay is on the forums.
    And then there is the EMC forum, of course. Which is, like for the RR ones, linked to the game in practical ways (auctions, outposts, events announcements, etc. are dealt with here), so are not avoidable.
    I like the feeling of community and the sometimes constructive exchanges. I like my human fellows, I empathize with them, even when I dislike the way they think. I hate the trolls, dislike the stupidly stubborn ones, the doom-prophets, but also the censorship, the recent oversensitiveness, the modern taboos and the spoiled ones who think they are the center of the world and require the world to be as they want it to be or not at all. The list is long. So I tend to avoid discussion, overall, but I listen, and intervene only if I think something is getting too far or really needs to be corrected.
    607 likes this.
  11. I joined my first forum when I was 9 years old. It was the official forum for Wie is de Mol jr?, a spin-off of one of the most popular Dutch tv shows at the time (and probably still) featuring kids instead of adults. Unfortunately I don't think any posts from that forum were caught in the web archive, and I approached the tv station about it, but they said they do not have any of the old message boards archived. (which is strange! :confused:) There are however just a few captures of the homepage, and on this one you can see that I was in fact active on this forum. :D

    That's already a lot better than nothing, as I suppose some people who were on forums a long time ago might have no evidence of it anymore beyond their own memory. :)
    A bit later (in 2009) I joined the Dutch (unofficial) Super Mario forum, where I stayed for a while, but eventually left because the amount of trolls increased greatly, and the mods dealt with them very childishly (to be honest, probably all of the mods were children). After I left one of the mods actually started posting under my account. :confused: :confused: :confused: The forum was closed a year or two later. From this forum, a lot more is in the Web Archive, including some of my posts. :D Actually, looking through the Archive, a whole lot more than I thought is in there. I can't look through it all now, but I'll see if I can find a particularly funny post of mine. ;)
    Yess, I found it!
    One person doubted that it was still customary to have parents impose a limit on digital time, but other replies showed that it was wide-spread. And I warned that it can be quite addictive!

    After I left this forum, I did not join any other forums. My father was active on two Dutch forums, and I considered joining either of them, but I didn't (it's probably good I did not, as these two forums were actually populated with adults instead of kids :p). The first English forum I recall joining is in fact EMC. But after that I have joined at least a dozen of other forums, all English-speaking ones.
    In the month of October, I was active on seven other forums. But my main has always been EMC, and if it's up to me, it always will be. :D
    TomvanWijnen and Jelle68 like this.
  12. Any other stories or opinions? :)
  13. A few days ago I remembered that I have been active on a forum between 2009 and 2013. When I moved across the Netherlands in 2010, my female friends from elementary school wanted a way to stay in contact with me, so they had me create an account on goSupermodel. Do any of you know it? :D I don't remember much about it, as I never got into it too much - it was intended only for girls, anyway. But I do remember making a post on the forum, once. :p I wasn't really active there, though; I also remember that it was exclusively Dutch, whereas now that I looked it up it turns out that it was larger than just the Netherlands.
    This information doesn't add a lot to my story, but there's actually a good reason to make this post beyond bumping the thread and increasing my post counter: I looked up goSupermodel, and found out that it was closed in 2016. In the goodbye blog post, the following reason is given:
    (I don't know what Momio is, but this article is from Momio, so it's no wonder that they used it as an example :rolleyes:)
    Jelle68 and TomvanWijnen like this.