Are Forum Boards Still Relevant?

[RedBar]

My realworld job is in the huge global industry of construction, I supply my products to the largest projects down to the smallest DIY job bought from your local store, retailer or garden centre.

My industry in the very early 90s was one of the very early adoptors of the www and I can tell you it was a godsend to us all however over the past 4-5 years I have noticed a dramatic reduction in trade forum board sites to the point whereby there are very, very few remaining, in fact realistically there is only one US board that is frequented and even then only be a dwindling few.

Are forum boards no longer de rigeur, have many companies/people gotten so used to their "new www" way of doing business and entrenched themselves to this reality since no matter what they may try to do they can't actually do anything much different to what they were doing say, pre-1995?

In the 90s/00s I used ot get regular emails from Joe Public asking where they could buy such and such a product of mine, these days it's maybe once a month at the most. Forum boards used to be full asking similar questions, these days it is very rare.

Facebook/Twitter seem to have hardly registered a dent in my industry, sure there are those of us attempting social yet not many seem to want to participate.

Are you in an industry whereby all currently is going well yet webwise seems to be treading water?

[martinibuster]

This is a good question. I think part of the answer lies in the attitude by search engineers about UGC. I believe they distrust forum UGC and with good reason. A board tends to have an opinion flavor, a general consensus that "appears" to be the majority opinion, although that's just an illusion. Nevertheless, this slant contributes to the perception that UGC content is unreliable. In some cases this is true, where various conspiracy theories, myths and folk tales are concerned.

[not2easy]

Places like houzz seem to have struck at traditional forums with their own, more pinterest-like approach. I don't use it, but see it coming up a lot in searches for construction, renovation and landscaping terms. Trades people are well represented there.

[londrum]

i think people want, and expect, instant answers these days, but forums aren't very good for that -- you generally have to wait

i still have a forum on my site which gets some use, but i have noticed that a lot of people will post a question and never return. if they don't see some kind of response in the time it takes to blink your eyes, then they go elsewhere, never to return — not even to check on their question.
that is what everyone is used to now, after using things like twitter and facebook

[RedBar]

Places like houzz seem to have struck at traditional forums

Good point, whereas people used to go to forums looking for answers/solutions, they now go to such sites posting solutions/suggestions/ideas.

I suppose where they used to post expecting to get answers from pros they're now telling "everyone" what they want.

Would that be a fair thing to observe?

[roycerus]

I run a forum which is fairly popular and saw a major drop in traffic around 2012. I had to change things very rapidly to stay in business.

- Had to purge all the useless threads which had no replies or had little content.
- Had to purge replies which were too short or were just making the page content thin.
- Added Google Plus to make sure I get +1's - my industry people don't really blog or run sites and is not very common in PR news.
- Restructured servers and negotiated cheaper rates all over the place.
- Put measures to make sure only good threads are retained after a time period.

Google is now ranking sites based on the view of the site as a whole and also at an individual page level. Its as if the signal of the quality of the "whole site" is an intuition for the ranking algorithm. These days most of the major search terms rank content from respective service providers who have invested heavily in creating a loop of information which all go towards their product. Add videos, get social shares, spend some to get some links, get industry experts to opine on the content and you are in business.

Also you have to realize that MOST sites are actually forums - content threads. The only difference is the level of familiarity and the "influence of the network of content producers". Facebook is "family", Linkedin is "people at work" and twitter is "celebs or opinionators". Forums on the other hand is mostly a public park where anyone can meet anyone or say anything without much consequence. Such information is difficult to validate but can sometimes be useful intelligence and I think some will perhaps survive. But I agree with Londrum - there needs to be a way to make things real-time and immediate.

[tangor]

From a commerce point of view forums seem to be too slow for customers. Chat and Support do better, as long as there is a live person at the company side.

Where forums excel these days, is community, though FB and others have overshadowed the "forum".

Everything on the web is a "forum" of some kind, even just an aggregation of web sites sitting out there is like a forum.

Where like interests have reasonable numbers, a forum can exist.... but will it bring in others who do not have that same interest? No likely.

[roycerus]

I remember Webmasterworld was in the top 1000 Alexa - now its reaching 10,000. People don't have time to sit and read conversations anymore - they need quick answers. Its probably sites like Twitter and Quora who have taken over all the traffic on conversations.

[EditorialGuy]

I think it depends on the topic and whether there's a critical mass of users. TripAdvisor and Cruise Critic are two examples of sites that have extremely large and active forums. (In the case of Cruise Critic, the forums dwarf the non-crowdsourced content.)

[Dymero]

Depends on the platform. For some reason, at least with tech topics, the Stack Exchange franchise of sites does incredibly well. Any programming/coding question I put to Google, a Stack Exchange site dominates the SERP. A few other sites come up for other tech topics. For the most part, though, Google does not like forums very much.

[piatkow]

i think people want, and expect, instant answers these days, but forums aren't very good for that -- you generally have to wait

I have seem people posting only minutes after their original post complaining that nobody has bothered to reply on some forums.

There are still plenty of active ones around but I wouldn't bother setting up a new one.

[toidi]

If the search engines don't serve up forums they shrivel up and go away. It is really sad to see so much useful information disappear.

[londrum]

One thing i have noticed... when you visit some forums on iOS they have a little nag banner at the top asking you to install their app.
I've never actually done it, so i dont know what the forum apps do, but presumably the website and app synch together.
That might be a decent way up upping the post count on the website

[silentneedle]

One of our customers lost 50% of traffic from google since 2013, it was a slow decline, month by month. It's one of the biggest forums in DE. We've also monitoring similar drops on other forums in Google DE.