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Post by greentongue on Aug 11, 2021 11:28:11 GMT -6
As the survey showed, there are a lot of "experienced" people that post here.
Likely, most remember back when there were dialup Bulletin Board Sites.
With the changing times, do you see the peak of forums as having passed?
Are they going the way of wired phones?
Is what we have now better or just "The Next New Thing!!"?
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Post by Deleted on Aug 11, 2021 12:23:24 GMT -6
Forums and chat rooms are largely seen as relics of Usenet and internet 1.0 these days. There's still a few around but definitely not a booming format.
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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 11, 2021 13:28:23 GMT -6
The thing for me is that most of the "modern" communications methods seems to focus very much on the "here and now" such that people discuss stuff and then it fades away with time. A message board forum like this can have many sub-board, each with its own discussion, and this stuff stays on page 1 of each sub-board for quite a while. If, for example, I am interested in Warriors of Mars but not Gangbusters then I can choose to revisit the one board and ignore the other and not feel like I've missed anything. Communication on a place like Facebook seems to vanish and is sometimes really hard to find again later, but in a message board older posts can be archived for years. A couple of years before I created this place I used to visit a place called "Trollhalla" (which was the official webpage of Tunnels & Trolls) and I got frustrated by the fact that it was all one long string of posts with no real organization or whatnot. That's what prompted me to start the TrollBridge (also on proboards) and then later this place. I just find the organization of message boards to be so much better than pretty much any other type of communication out there, but what I hear about "modern" places like discord make them sound a lot more like Trollhalla and a lot less like what I like. I hope that message boards don't go away, although I can say that if I go a week between visits for a lot of boards (Troll Lord, Goodman, sometimes Comeback Inn) there are hardly any posts. This place gets good traffic, as does Dragonsfoot and a few others, but in general I fear that younger gamers are headed elsewhere.  |
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Post by acodispo on Aug 11, 2021 19:42:06 GMT -6
Discourse is an open-source software that I see a lot of organizations and communities of various types deploying as a matter of course. It is a forum software but with a lot of modern touches that can make it feel a lot more responsive, connected, that sort of thing. Reddit is more forum-like in some ways than many other social medias & seems to be quite popular.
There does seem to be a desire for forums (or something like them) when serious, in-depth, search-able, link-able, categorizable discussion is desired. And I see Slack & Discord (which are essentially chat room softwares) adding "threading" features recently that seem to be trying to make up for their deficiencies in comparison to forums.
All which to say I don't actually think they aren't going away. They see less casual use, perhaps, but serious discussion still gets done in forums or in email discussion lists rather than in social media streams.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 11, 2021 20:49:50 GMT -6
Some old forms of digital communication are still in use. There are a lot of people on IRC everyday, there are (quite a lot of) people that still use gopher (this was the trend before www, html and javascript) and even finger still around, but quite niche. Mailing lists are still pretty much in use. There are some BBS around but you have to find them. I still visit a BBS regularly (the BJJ in tildeverse), but it's not often active and it's a very subculture nerdy space. BBS still a huge thing in some places, that's very cultural really, Facebook and Instagram are a thing in both Americas but I'm not sure if it holds true on other continents. PTT is a Taiwanese BBS that have more than 2 million unique visitors per day, they still access it through Telnet, but you can take a look at the web version: www.ptt.cc/bbs/index.htmlAs far as I know, people still use BBS in Japan as well. There are a lot of other places that resemble forums and BBSs, such as reddit and the various chan websites. Sometimes I think that blogs and forums still can thrive if new, better versions where launched. nodebb.org is a new trendy forum platform and ghost.org is a blog platform that seems to be a success. I never used any of them, but maybe they can grow even more or other alternatives might show up in the future. |
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Post by hamurai on Aug 11, 2021 23:34:38 GMT -6
I've joined a couple of Discord servers but they're a mess. I really don't get why it's so popular. I prefer forums!  |
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Post by jeffb on Aug 12, 2021 5:38:57 GMT -6
I've joined a couple of Discord servers but they're a mess. I really don't get why it's so popular. I prefer forums! Me three. I'm on the TLG Discord, and FFilz' RQ Discord. On Frank's there is not much traffic, or different "areas" to post in, and it's not terribly hard to navigate. But the TLG version has about 50 hashtagged abbreviated "areas" and I cannot even tell what the hell 90% of them are for or where I should post, so I haven't. Not user-friendly in the slightest. I don't see how anyone could use that as their main form of communication online. And as Finarvyn is saying, it's impossible to go find something in the past without scrolling through a bunch of other nonsense. I've never had a Farcebook account and do not intend to. I'm on Twitter, but it's such a cesspool, I have backed way off (and it's useless for gaming talk). I'm guessing forums like these here at Proboards will die, eventually. But I will be here going down with the ship! ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr |
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Post by waysoftheearth on Aug 12, 2021 5:46:35 GMT -6
Meanwhile, Proboards V6 went into closed beta testing this Feb, so... there's at least one more cycle in it |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 12, 2021 6:38:46 GMT -6
I've joined a couple of Discord servers but they're a mess. I really don't get why it's so popular. I prefer forums! I could tell you why, if you really wanna know. It's not really dinner table conversation, but it's kind of an open secret that much like Reddit, people tend to use Discord for "adult chat". It doubles as a vanilla social media platform, but a LOT of that goes on there. I accidentally joined the wrong "roleplay" server one time and the voice chats were something else. I don't think any of that was canon to Forgotten Realms as I understand it, unless one considers that infamous d20 supplement from around 20 years ago. |
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Post by jeffb on Aug 12, 2021 8:01:36 GMT -6
I've joined a couple of Discord servers but they're a mess. I really don't get why it's so popular. I prefer forums! I could tell you why, if you really wanna know. It's not really dinner table conversation, but it's kind of an open secret that much like Reddit, people tend to use Discord for "adult chat". It doubles as a vanilla social media platform, but a LOT of that goes on there. I accidentally joined the wrong "roleplay" server one time and the voice chats were something else. I don't think any of that was canon to Forgotten Realms as I understand it, unless one considers that infamous d20 supplement from around 20 years ago.   |
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Post by acodispo on Aug 12, 2021 8:19:03 GMT -6
Re: Discord -- once I understood that Discord was a chat room software (like IRC) it made more sense. Yes, you can search & pin posts, but it's designed for real-time, in-the-moment communication. I think of Discord as a room I can enter, where there will be a conversation happening. Sometimes that's scheduled, sometimes its not. In any case, it's ephemeral. It's happening when it's happening, but not really happening when it's not. Discord is a little unusual for a chat in that you can scroll back through every conversation that's every happened in that room, but that's what you get (easily) with a digital medium. A forum, BBS, or email list, on the other hand, is asynchronous communication. Literally like posting an open letter in a public place, and coming back the next day to see if anyone has pinned a reply underneath. Different tools, different uses. I wouldn't use a forum for a scheduled game (i.e. we're playing from 7-10pm), I would use Discord or another chat software. But I would use a forum for a PbP. And on the matter of sexual communication on Discord, as far as I know every communication tool (Internet or otherwise) is used for "adult" communication to some extent or other. No surprise there. |
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Post by geoffrey on Aug 12, 2021 12:43:33 GMT -6
The thing for me is that most of the "modern" communications methods seems to focus very much on the "here and now" such that people discuss stuff and then it fades away with time. A message board forum like this can have many sub-board, each with its own discussion, and this stuff stays on page 1 of each sub-board for quite a while. If, for example, I am interested in Warriors of Mars but not Gangbusters then I can choose to revisit the one board and ignore the other and not feel like I've missed anything. Communication on a place like Facebook seems to vanish and is sometimes really hard to find again later, but in a message board older posts can be archived for years. Yep. I have no use for all that computer ephemera. That sort of thing is similar to walking up to a group of random people talking about a random D&D topic, chatting with them for 5 minutes, and then walking away and forgetting the conversation ever happened. I see very little (if any) point. I'd literally rather stare at the wall. |
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Post by Falconer on Aug 12, 2021 13:09:21 GMT -6
Man, this thread is making me want to get back into BBSes.
A few weeks ago, I moved the Apple //e into the living room and plugged it into the family TV. I told my wife it was there to stay, because it’s better for the kids than vegging out. It’s been great!
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Post by thegreyelf on Aug 12, 2021 15:59:45 GMT -6
Forums are absolutely superior than social media discussion groups and Discord chats. Unfortunately, I don't see the kids going back. Forums are absolutely going the way of BBS's, though they won't go away as entirely. They'll be a niche thing for those of us who have communities like this that we enjoy visiting.
I have a forum and a facebook group for Elf Lair Games. I have a fairly active (if small) community on Facebook. I haven't had a single post on the forums, and I've advertised both in the same places. It's sad and it sucks, but yeah, it is what it is.
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Post by jeffb on Aug 12, 2021 18:34:52 GMT -6
Man, this thread is making me want to get back into BBSes. A few weeks ago, I moved the Apple //e into the living room and plugged it into the family TV. I told my wife it was there to stay, because it’s better for the kids than vegging out. It’s been great! Time to load up some Eamon and Proving grounds of the Mad Overlord |
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Post by makofan on Aug 13, 2021 5:52:56 GMT -6
My brain can't deal with Discord's lack of defined structure; I run all my games on a forum with heirarchical (spelling?) sub-forums, clearly pinned reference charts at the top, and clearly labelled posts. It hasn't changed in 13 years, and I can't see it changing. Back in the $2/hour dialup Compuserve days, I used to hang out in a CRPG group and chat
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Post by acodispo on Aug 13, 2021 8:22:37 GMT -6
Forums are absolutely superior than social media discussion groups and Discord chats. I'm going to keep harping on this point, because I think it's an important one: to me forums and chat (e.g. Discord) are totally different media with totally different best uses. Apples & oranges, so I wouldn't say that one's superior over the other.
For example, while I play in several forum games ( makofan 's among others) and enjoy them immensely, I ran a campaign for two years over Discord that I never could have run via forum. It was a scheduled, real-time game conducted via text chat. I.e. 1-4pm most Sundays we'd all be in the Discord chat room, playing in real time. Each session got its own Discord "channel", so we did end up with a fairly neat archive of each play session. Characters & other permanent info was kept on a wiki. We used Discord chat for real-time playing of the game, and a permanent content tool (wiki) for not-real-time-stuff (we could have used a forum for that but I prefer wiki for that specific use).
Different tools for different uses.
And that's why I don't think forums are going anywhere: they are a specific communication medium that works very well for certain types of communication. They are not better than chat, better than social streams, or better than micro-blog, they are just different. They'll certainly evolve as time goes on (see Discourse and Flarum), but their core form & assumptions are fundamental and will probably be around as long as human beings are communicating via electronic written words.
P.S. If you're curious how I organized my Discord game (in a way that I felt best utilized the strengths of the media I was using), feel free to take a look: Werdna World Discord Server, Werdna World Wiki (the game's on long-term hiatus but the channels & wiki are all still there & active) |
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Post by aramis on Aug 14, 2021 3:59:18 GMT -6
I'll note that BBSs are still bringing in 30-somethings... it's not like BBSs in the 80's at all... the BBS scene was mostly young - under 30 - and the most popular in 1989-1996 Anchorage were all multi-line galacticom chat boards... with no reading back posts. Very much like Discord, except dial in. I was buying credits on L&L... worked out to 25 cents an hour. Later, it went to about $0.50 per hour. When Lunatic's Asylum shifted to Galacticom (it was a WWIVnet board when I first logged in,) Lunatic had managed to get a steady internet link, and I was able to use the BBS as an ISP as well as a chat board. L&L, Roaring Lion, Lunatic's Asylum... Galacticom Fireweed OPUS was a part of a national network. Most of the single or dual line BBSs had daily limits, There were also the national dial-ups ... Compuserve, Genie, Delphi... which had both chatrooms and stable forums. The chat rooms saw more use than BBSs... I do miss the .qwk packet... BBSs are still a going thing, especially in gaming. The age range on the Modiphius and Free League forums seem much younger than here, Old School Trek, Citizens of the Imperium... RPGgeek also seems a bit younger, but not as much. Once chat boards started, BBS forums became secondary. That's not much different than today, except that the BBSs are easier to set up, cheaper to run, and easier to access world-wide. Discord, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook aren't replacing BBSs. Most of the BBS users use both text chat and BBS for different roles. The real cause of the demise of so many BBSs is the EU and Canadian data protection laws... running a BBS as a Canadian or EU business is a HUGE liability. So most game companies in the EU have dropped theirs. I've joined a couple of Discord servers but they're a mess. I really don't get why it's so popular. I prefer forums! The popularity is the real time text and voice chats, plus support for bots. I wrote my own die-roller... semi-spaghetti-coded python, but it generates rolls reliably. Now I just need to learn docker and/or kubernetes to be able to deploy it to my website. |
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Post by hamurai on Aug 14, 2021 4:25:44 GMT -6
Sure, it's great for voice chats and that's how we use it all the time for our VTT role-playing.
Using it as a substitute for a forum, though, is what I don't get. I've seen groups from Mewe, for example, move to Discord. I can't see how that benefits the group, unless the idea is to voice chat and directly chat together.
I see forums as re-readable pools of ideas and thoughts. Discord fails at that, or I can't see how it's done in a comfortable way.
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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 14, 2021 5:27:22 GMT -6
I have a forum and a facebook group for Elf Lair Games. I have a fairly active (if small) community on Facebook. I haven't had a single post on the forums, and I've advertised both in the same places. It's sad and it sucks, but yeah, it is what it is. I go to your forum occasionally and want to post something, but often hit some sort of "writer's block" and can't come up with something interesting to post. Boards like this have some sort of "critical mass" of posters and if there aren't enough the conversations fizzle. I have no idea how to build a forum up to that point and suspect it's just luck/unluck. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2021 5:58:34 GMT -6
I have a forum and a facebook group for Elf Lair Games. I have a fairly active (if small) community on Facebook. I haven't had a single post on the forums, and I've advertised both in the same places. It's sad and it sucks, but yeah, it is what it is. I go to your forum occasionally and want to post something, but often hit some sort of "writer's block" and can't come up with something interesting to post. Boards like this have some sort of "critical mass" of posters and if there aren't enough the conversations fizzle. I have no idea how to build a forum up to that point and suspect it's just luck/unluck. It was timing, too. If you'd made this forum a year earlier or six months later than you did, the conversations might have never started up at all. |
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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 14, 2021 6:57:45 GMT -6
A lot of the boards which used to be active are pretty silent nowadays, and I wonder if it is because some of the creators are going out of their way to move onto "something better." The Troll Lord Games board doesn't get much action, and I think a lot of their chatter has moved to Facebook. Comeback Inn is pretty quiet, and maybe for the same reasons. Goodman Games forum is dead but their Facebook presence extends to a couple of FB groups. Facebook may be absorbing a lot of the chatter, but a number of my friends don't want to have a FB account.
Falconer's Star Trek boards suffer a similar fate to Jason's, where there just aren't enough posts to keep folks interested for an extended time. Below that "critical mass" threshold, I guess. I notice some of these things more right now as I'm a teacher in summer break, so I have more time to keep checking back and am disappointed to not find continual action. That's where I look deeper into my bookmarks list and am disappointed to find that a lot of those boards don't change much from day to day.
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Post by makofan on Aug 14, 2021 8:05:23 GMT -6
I agree with acodispo - different tools for different things. I have no interest in real-time gaming that is not in-person; I have tried all sorts of things, from Discord to Table Top Simulator, VASSAL, hangouts, etc - it just doesn't work for me. Forums can meet everybody's schedule for a game - I post now, others post while I am sleeping, for example |
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Post by Falconer on Aug 14, 2021 8:56:23 GMT -6
It would have been nice for Old School Trek to build a critical mass and be bustling with activity, but honestly I have always been okay with it as it is. The great thing about a good forum is that at the end of the day you have build a website full of content. I go there all the time to read old threads since I am running a Trek game right now. We still get a trickle of activity since people are interested in the topic. I’d like to think Old School Trek found a niche that nobody else is covering at all. Zero regrets.
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Post by Merias on Aug 14, 2021 10:03:45 GMT -6
We have a few active PbP games at my own forum, and an occasional post, and I'm also OK with that. Recently I moved my blog to a self-hosted one, and rather than have to worry about how to integrate comments, I now just link each blog post to a forum post. As others have said, forums are far better at in-depth conversation and allow searching to a degree no social media sites can match. I lamented the decline of forums years ago on my old blog, in this case when G+ use was on the rise by many old-school gamers: smolderingwizard.com/2014/12/21/g-communities-the-good-and-the-bad/My main gripe then and now was/is the ephemeral nature of social media. The old posts here and at Dragonsfoot are a historical goldmine, can you imagine if during the time when Gary was posting regularly on the various forums, only G+ was available? All that history would be lost. Most forums are also indexed by the public search engines (speaking of ... I'm curious why this forum does not allow unregistered users to view posts?). I don't think much has changed, apart from G+ being replaced by MeWe and FB, etc. The big forums are still quite active. I tend not to like the newer forums, the javascript-heavy interfaces are clunky and often broken on older browsers and OSs that I like to use. |
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Post by Starbeard on Aug 14, 2021 10:58:44 GMT -6
My own hunch is that traditional forums will continue to be used but with an increasing focus on academic communities (broadly speaking; I would consider this forum essentially academic in style—serious discussion about a subject where posterity and longterm continuity of information is tantamount).
I am on several fully academic forums, as in made by and for university researchers, and I see that the same people who converse on social media still use those forums as well — they just have different kinds of conversations. On Facebook groups it's a lot of sharing pictures, making silly asides, sending out blanket requests for help with a book or reference, while the actual sharing and discussion of one's current research goes into the private forum. That stuff simply wouldn't work on social media or Discord, nor would they be safe or protected in terms of copyright issues.
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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 14, 2021 11:32:16 GMT -6
It would have been nice for Old School Trek to build a critical mass and be bustling with activity, but honestly I have always been okay with it as it is. The great thing about a good forum is that at the end of the day you have build a website full of content. I go there all the time to read old threads since I am running a Trek game right now. We still get a trickle of activity since people are interested in the topic. I’d like to think Old School Trek found a niche that nobody else is covering at all. Zero regrets. Honestly, that's always been my feeling for this place. Rafe always was trying to get me to expand and grow "the brand" or some such, but I'm just as happy having a place where a few friends can sit around and chat about stuff we like. Bigger boards just seem to create more headaches.  |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 14, 2021 11:38:36 GMT -6
It would have been nice for Old School Trek to build a critical mass and be bustling with activity, but honestly I have always been okay with it as it is. The great thing about a good forum is that at the end of the day you have build a website full of content. I go there all the time to read old threads since I am running a Trek game right now. We still get a trickle of activity since people are interested in the topic. I’d like to think Old School Trek found a niche that nobody else is covering at all. Zero regrets. Honestly, that's always been my feeling for this place. Rafe always was trying to get me to expand and grow "the brand" or some such, but I'm just as happy having a place where a few friends can sit around and chat about stuff we like. Bigger boards just seem to create more headaches. It's a tricky thing. I mention this place to the youngsters on Discord or Reddit who specifically seem to display a scholarly interest or a desire to join an OD&D pbp with experienced old school gamers. I feel this place can also be a good place to "reach deez keedz" to playfully quote the movie Stand And Deliver. But not all or even most. I don't see the modern osr in general as even being old school oriented any more. It's kind of become a "quirky indie hangout" with vaguely old school art aesthetics. I feel this place by contrast maybe sticks closer to keeping it seventies. And we seem to have less snark and locked dumpster fire threads than DF. That's a plus. |
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Post by talysman on Aug 14, 2021 12:59:23 GMT -6
I have a split opinion.
On the one hand, BBSes and Usenet didn't really go away when the Internet came along. They just moved onto the Internet. In some cases, literally; Usenet before the internet was distributed via Unix computers calling each other and transferring files. I wasn't on Usenet that far back (not a member of Club 91,) but there was some overlap... first Usenet connection I had was still uucp-based, even though the bulk of Usenet users were getting their feed via nntp. And a few months back, one of the old BBS sysops I was still in touch with via Facebook put a citadel BBSes up on the web and was trying to get some of us oldies back on... but people just didn't have the time.
But ignoring the literal survival of those old forms of communication on the Internet, I've always seen forums as being the successors of BBSes and Usenet. Sure, they might not have the same look-and-feel of the Cits I used to hang out on, and they may still be trying to solve the problems Usenet solved long ago, but they fill the same role. And the widespread availability of more ephemeral "chat" social media may seem like an obstacle, but old folks may remember that there were always people on BBSes, but especially on Usenet and on forums, who misinterpret them as live chat, with people posting a question, then posting a follow-up "Hello? Is anyone listening?" followed by a string of increasingly angry posts until someone posts in all-caps "THIS IS NOT A CHAT ROOM!!!1!"
Even among people who realize forums and the like aren't live, has anyone noticed that a huge chunk of what gets posted on forums is essentially ephemeral chit-chat, not something that needs to be preserved? So to a certain extent, the growing dominance of ephemeral social media means that there's less of a need to get your socializing done via that instead of as a forum thread. Shrinking forum activity may actually just be a sign that this is working, and people are using forums for legit in-depth conversations that ought to be preserved. I am a little worried that it might be going too far, especially since the people with the money who control such things are pushing towards more ephemerality and see useful, permanent material as something to be discouraged rather than funded.
It's worrisome, and I have no firm solutions, although I have vague ideas of what I'd like to see done to fix the problem. But I'm generally convinced that forums, or their next incarnation, will not be going away.
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Post by Vile Traveller on Aug 14, 2021 13:52:30 GMT -6
News of Steve Perrin's death reminded me that I'm still subscribed to the RQ Rules list, though I unsubscribed from the Glorantha list a long time ago. Lev was still posting to it once every few months a little while ago, though it had otherwise gone almost silent compared to even the early 2000s.
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