Comments on: The 'decline of online message boards' doesn't have to happen

By: 76.30.133.91

76.30.133.91 — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:43:57 +0000

The biggest board killer is Disqus. If you can have comment threads right on the site of the content itself, why bother discussing it on a board?

By: Paul Lagasse

Paul Lagasse — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:11:22 +0000

Although I can’t speak to the overall health of discussion boards, I was recently witness to their particular power. I am a lurking member of the Professional Pilots Rumour Network (PPRuNe, http://www.pprune.org), which is an online water cooler for commercial, military, and cargo pilots and affiliated professions. For years, the Military Aircrew forum has hosted a “sticky” thread dedicated to exonerating the pilots of an RAF helicopter that crashed in Scotland in 1994, killing the pilots and 27 others. A subsequent Board of Inquiry found the pilots guilty of “gross negligence,” a charge that many knowledgeable people felt was unfair given the prevailing weather conditions and questions about the helicopter’s airworthiness.

For over a decade, PPRuNe members (including serving military personnel contributing anonymously) used the thread to argue and clarify the issues for over a decade, pass along news and information about efforts to reopen the investigation, and to gather support from the broader aviation community. In part due to the efforts of the thread participants, an independent legal review was recently completed that cleared the pilots of the charge of “gross negligence.”

As a spectator, I have absolutely no stake in or knowledgeable opinion about the case or its outcome, but it was nevertheless a vivid object lesson in the power of forums, and one that convinced me that forums have very important roles to play, many of which may not have even been discovered yet.

By: 98.215.44.75

98.215.44.75 — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 21:01:21 +0000

If you think “caring” is what boards are all about, think again.
This will strike you as conceptual, but online community, as expressed through message boards, is very much akin to anti-Hate groups acting in actual practice, i.e. “it’s Hate under a different name”. If you doubt this, try an experiment. Have just one or two semi-major boards rescind all rules re: prosocial behavior, for 48 hours (announcing this, a priori). All moderators must Stand Down. It won’t be a lake of sickness and Hatred you’ll be reading, and it won’t be sailed upon by just a few. It’ll be tidal, 10′s and 10′s of thousands.
Online boards are dying, because of stringent “scat cleanup”; as a result, only the mildest and (strangely) emotionally dead, stick around. Thus, the % takes a colossal nosedive. You haven’t corrected anyone’s behavior in order to be able to “play”, you see. You’ve merely made them go away. Perhaps that’s a good thing, but by juxtaposing this (conceptual) bit of wisdom with your article, we see the downside: If one insists, now, Today, on the proprieties at all times, you’re left with about 1/20th of whom you invited to your party.

By: Joe Ewaskiw

Joe Ewaskiw — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:30:23 +0000

Great perspective, Robert. As the provider of one of the most-used forum software products on the Internet, we at vBulletin hardly think online message boards are in decline. Rather, it’s been more of a shakeout in the space. Strong, quality boards have grown and thrived as the Internet has matured, while neglected or irrelevant boards have seen deserved declines in users.

What makes a strong board? A variety of relevant content (including photos, videos, blogs, reviews, and rich user profiles), keeping up to date with new forum software releases, and adding expected features like the ability to log in with a Facebook account and offering the forum as a mobile app so users can interact with the forum on the go. All of this is possible, but it takes regular attention from the board operator(s) to nurture a community and encourage passionate interaction among users. As you noted, operating a forum is much more than opening an account and “setting and forgetting” it.

Facebook and Twitter are amazing social networks, but they tend to be very broad in terms of social connections. Out of all your friends on the “big” social networks, you probably won’t find too many who are interested in constantly and obsessively discussing your favorite obscure hobby. So there’s still very much a place for quality message boards with a defined purpose.

To add some perspective, we have more people running vBulletin on their websites today than at any time in history, and our largest customers tell us that their traffic measures on their vBulletin websites (page views and unique visits) continue to grow around 20% year-over-year. In many cases, these site operators are seeing profits growing at an even larger rate as advertisers understand the value of these niche communities.

Message boards are hardly relics from Web 1.0. They are the original social networks, and we strongly believe they will continue to evolve with the Internet for years to come.

Joe Ewaskiw
Public Relations Manager
Internet Brands, Inc., parent company of vBulletin
(also USC Annenberg ’05)