Could the software be killing forums?

[Shawn Gossman1]

I belong to a lot of online communities.

Some of them I pay to on. Most I'm on are free.

One thing they all share as a common is a more modern look and feel to them.

SaaS like Slack and Circle are widely used online community solutions.

Could the "old school" styles of message forum software still being used today be what is actually killing forums?

Could it just be a design and development problem?

What do you all think?

 

[Uncrowned]

I feel like forum software is in a pretty good spot right now but it could still use a bit more modern features. However, I would say the flip side of this point is the issue. Forums dominated as there were basically static sites, forums, and live chat. Today there is social media, discord, teams, Reddit, and so many more products and choices that haven't really "killed" forums but have given people other options, and now forums are just settling into their own space.

 

[Tracy]

Forum software simply needs to progress. It's not enough to simply have a "posting" area... you need much more.
IPS somewhat sees that. Wotlab was observant of that a few years ago when they put article abilities into the base script.
XenForo.. it's still stuck in the stone ages where they want the majority of the offloading of "niceties" done by third party and they make a simple half-assed attempt to address some of the issues.
Honestly.. with the current status of XF and their lack of updates, if it wasn't for the need to have custom IPS Pages add-ons created, I'd probably end up going to them... even though they will probably be killing the stand-alone script in the near future.
For some strange reason, XF developers are stuck in the 1990's/2000 era. They've got suggestions that have been out there for a decade that they haven't reacted on, either by closing them, marking them as not planned or anything else.
They won't like the comment, but honestly, it's sheer frigging stupidity upon their part. The ONLY thing that saves them is that their forum support is fairly solid (albeit it's slacking lately).
And the irony is, I REALLY like XF script...but the lack of foresight of the developers is a tad bit frustrating.

 

[Shawn Gossman1]

I feel like forum software is in a pretty good spot right now but it could still use a bit more modern features. However, I would say the flip side of this point is the issue. Forums dominated as there were basically static sites, forums, and live chat. Today there is social media, discord, teams, Reddit, and so many more products and choices that haven't really "killed" forums but have given people other options, and now forums are just settling into their own space.

I just mainly wonder if the masses are getting used to the modernization of the online community. Forums are still used by many people but their often seen as old products, kind of like what we probably thought about discussion lists and mIRC back when forums were in their peak days.

Forum software simply needs to progress. It's not enough to simply have a "posting" area... you need much more.
IPS somewhat sees that. Wotlab was observant of that a few years ago when they put article abilities into the base script.
XenForo.. it's still stuck in the stone ages where they want the majority of the offloading of "niceties" done by third party and they make a simple half-assed attempt to address some of the issues.
Honestly.. with the current status of XF and their lack of updates, if it wasn't for the need to have custom IPS Pages add-ons created, I'd probably end up going to them... even though they will probably be killing the stand-alone script in the near future.
For some strange reason, XF developers are stuck in the 1990's/2000 era. They've got suggestions that have been out there for a decade that they haven't reacted on, either by closing them, marking them as not planned or anything else.
They won't like the comment, but honestly, it's sheer frigging stupidity upon their part. The ONLY thing that saves them is that their forum support is fairly solid (albeit it's slacking lately).
And the irony is, I REALLY like XF script...but the lack of foresight of the developers is a tad bit frustrating.

I think it would be interesting to see what XF could do to modernize the forum software. I agree with you, really. It seemed as if they wanted to create a cool software that we all wanted after VB went from v3 to v4. They went through their legal stuff and ended up making the software we wanted.

But then it kind of stopped there and didn't evolve with the consumer of the software.

That's the issue I've seen with most forum platforms, developers make it based on how they envision it rather than how the customer envisions it. If you say that to forum developers, it will piss a lot of them off but in the end, it's the end-user who is buying the platform or downloading and consuming it. If you don't please them, they'll move on and find what they're looking for.

That's what I think....