this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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I tried running a forum.... With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn... And I followed best practices to set it up.
I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I'm old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren't many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
I spent a lot of time in a few forums in the 00s. Many of them still exist but they are shells of what they used to be. One that I check into once a year or so has about one post per year - and it's normally a post asking if anyone is still there. The owner keeps it running as a memorial to one of the mods who has passed.
yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.
I used to love Something Awful, which I think is still doing pretty well at a glance. So many good book recommendations.
Distro-specific forums are alive and kicking.
From your stats, it's clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.
Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.
But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.
Why don’t you share it here, I for one would be interesting in checking it out.
It's a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I'm happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/
Selfhtml is how I made my first webpages! Didn't think its still alive. Godspeed!
I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)
Thanks.
I guess I need to learn German now.
Thanks for sharing and for doing a big part in keeping the free internet we all love alive.
❤️
It's a pleasure!
I haven't run a BB forum for probably well over 15 years but in my experience the best thing was to just limit the ability to post for 24 hours after the account is being created (that makes getting caught and banned a bit more of a pain point because they have to wait 24 hours before they can do anything again) combined with just blocking Russian and Chinese IP addresses.
It's surprising how much rubbish that stops.
Including email confirmation for registering accounts, post limits for new accounts, initially being allowed only to the entry area where one has to post and introduce themselves to be allowed elsewhere?
In my childhood these were the basics.
Oh no, that's really sad and disgusting. Please share the link so that we know to avoid it.
Taken down long ago. I think on day 3
Yeah, was gonna say: it's not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.
Was it any good?
Well that's still better than the weird Indian witch doctor spam I see on a couple of forums I visit.
It's always fake passport scams that I get, where they will offer people fake passports but of course they don't actually have any capacity to make them, so they just take your money. Is there really a massive demand for fake passports all of a sudden?