Are (RPG) Message Boards starting to reach an inflection point of decline?

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I'm not a fan of discord either. I definitely prefer forums because the information is more permanent. I can search for threads and information from years ago- this is not possible on Discord.
 
Another reason and possibly the elephant in the room is how many forums have turned into echo chambers. Where one must agree 10000% with the rest of the board on a topic of the board. Or one can get unilaterally banned. Moderation is very unfair and one sided.

Why would someone who wants to have an objective discourse or discussion go to such forums.

Beyond here, another side and certain FB groups many are too much of the above. In another topic I mentioned another rpg publisher forum where the words “ crunch and fluff” are no longer allowed to be use. On their forum. Almost everywhere they can be used. I can’t guarantee I will never ever hurt another rpg devs feelings.

I don’t go out of my way to be rude or hurtful if one writes an objectively bad product I will give constructive criticism.

Unfortunately truly open place to have actual discussions online and out or few and far between. Which is why there is a decline.
 
Lunar Ronin said:
It's not just tabletop RPGs. Web forums as a whole have drastically declined over the past nine years or so. Web forums remain the prevue of Generation X and Baby Boomers. Millennials and Zoomers are all on Discord and Reddit, mostly refusing to use web forums as they seem them as antiquated, like house telephones.
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FWIW, and using this as a staging point rather than a direct reply, but I was pretty active in forums in the Warhammer 40,000 universe back in the day (first decade of the 2000s), but the landscape is markedly different now. It's like... crickets. It's interesting to see that this is not just a GW hobbyism thing.
 
TheoryofGame said:
funny-dancing-superheroes-ljdjdcy3kot6c0hs.gif
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I cannot unsee this. O.o
 
For me, the good/bad of discord is that it's pretty private. I used discord as a game campaign website and we do our thing without anyone else bothering us. You can post files, have some threads for info and others for discussion, plus the video and voice built in. The downside for me is that I've never found a good discord site other than being invited.
 
I'm on a couple of system-specific Discords but I find them pretty much useless to search for anything specific (rule question, homemade character sheet, etc.). I use campaign-specific channels for online campaigns and Discord is fine for that - real-time image sharing, dice rolling, etc. So, six of one.
 
Most people don't get that specific platforms were designed for specific purposes. There's some feature overlap, but as many have pointed out already, you gotta pick the right tool for the job. And most people don't.

Or rather, most people do, but they don't have a shared purpose. The company/manager chooses the platform it wants to communicate on. The customers/users just go where they're told or to whatever is available. That's not agreeing on a purpose.

I'd say most companies tend to shift to Discord exactly because it's more ephemeral. Most companies don't like historical records unless they have total control. Discord is better for more fleeting conversations and finding people with like-minded interests in the moment.

A tangential example: Player finders that are web-based, as far as I've seen, become very outdated--players don't maintain their profiles. System or setting-based Discord servers fill the gap nicely.

Community forums are clearly delineated in my mind's eye. There are people who won't touch the Pub with a ten foot pole. (Mine goes to 11, but even it won't reach Facebook groups.)
 
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Stan said:
For me, the good/bad of discord is that it's pretty private. I used discord as a game campaign website and we do our thing without anyone else bothering us. You can post files, have some threads for info and others for discussion, plus the video and voice built in. The downside for me is that I've never found a good discord site other than being invited.
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SoManyRats said:
I'm on a couple of system-specific Discords but I find them pretty much useless to search for anything specific (rule question, homemade character sheet, etc.). I use campaign-specific channels for online campaigns and Discord is fine for that - real-time image sharing, dice rolling, etc. So, six of one.
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Yeah, as you say, that's what Discord is good for: it's private, it's useful for real-time communication. That's about it:shade:.

It's not a forum because it's not trying to be, IMO. It's a chat service, with a "hub" structure.

I use it a lot, but mostly to keep in touch with other roleplayers, most of whom I've met IRL. I use it to organize online and offline sessions. I did recently send a copy of the free Outlaws of the Water Margin RPG to everyone on the channel, too, in case they find it of interest:thumbsup:.
Oh, and we use it to play online when most of us have gone to different cities (which happens on major holidays), or with people who just don't live in the country. It's a decent chat platform when you use it as one::honkhonk:.

But for discussions? Eh, sure, we do have some discussions there... But for most discussions, I head to the Pub, and not just because it's going to get lost on Discord:gooselove:.
Discussions on forums are easier to read at your leisure and to conduct asynchronously. It's just the medium doesn't fit that.

OTOH, on a system-specific Discord you can easily ask the authors of a system or supplement about it. Odds are, you're going to get a prompt answer. I mean, people usually like to talk about their games, we shouldn't even be surprised...they are still gamers like us:grin:!

And I expect (yes, of course I can be wrong, no need to remind me:tongue:) that forums are going to get a resurgence. They won't be nearly as big as they used to be, but that's because the people who wanted to use them for communication would have found their preferred chat programs and feel right at home there.
Those that want discussions, are going to find a slower-paced medium at some point, I'd expect.

So, you know - hammers, screwdrivers, not using D&D for S&S when you have BoL and Mythras, and so on:gooseshades:!
 
I'm on this forum, I peek at RPG.net, I tolerate Discord, I hate Reddit (can't figure it out and don't want to).

FB/Groups is so controlling it's not really all that fun. I'm just there because that's where a lot of my customers are. Instagram is just for fooling around.

Lots of gamers still on Twitter, which is where I spend most of my time.
 
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I don't think I've ever used Discord, now that I think about it.
 
Another vote that forums have been in major decline for a dozen+ years and that I really haven’t noticed any additional decline beyond that in the last 5 or 6 years.
 
Yeti Spaghetti said:
It's sort of necessary if you play on Roll20, given how glitchy their audio settings are.
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Teamspeak still exists.

I've ended up on Reddit. I've found it's not nearly as terrible as people make it out to be, but any conversation has a maximum life of about two days at most; after that the interface makes it basically impossible for meaningful conversation to continue. A really busy topic becomes broken into dozens of threads and impossible to follow within a day, while quieter ones just don't get seen.

Reddit is steadily being further enshittified, though, and it seems pretty clear the objective is to force everyone off the web platform and onto the app. When it becomes to much effort to use without the app, I will move on.

Discord is ok for casual chatting, which makes sense given it's a chat platform. Everyone else has already covered the issues with discord as a primary repository or knowledge and discussion.

The Pub is pretty much the only forum I frequent these days. I spent a fair bit of time on the Design Mechanism forums from 2013 - 2015 (ish), but the useful discussion is mostly on discord these days and, unfortunately, they got sucked into signing their souls over to Tapatalk, which is forums at their worst. I was on RPGnet for a long time, and it was hard to move on even after I came to despise the place, but once the initial withdrawals passed, I was much better for it. EnWorld was the first forum I spent any time on (just before RPGnet). I returned briefly just recently, but it's not really the place for me any more.

KenzerCo closed their forums down completely, and didn't even leave an archive up. From what I could see, they moved to Facebook of all places. That happened after I had already moved on, though, so didn't really affect me.
 
AsenRG said:
Yeah, as you say, that's what Discord is good for: it's private, it's useful for real-time communication. That's about it:shade:.

It's not a forum because it's not trying to be, IMO. It's a chat service, with a "hub" structure.
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But in practice, because you need an invite code/link, it's really just an #IRC server with bells and whistles, something that was considered quaint at the turn of the century.
 
What I have seen is a decrease in the overall participation in hobby specific message boards that are on their own independent separate websites, but not on ones that are part of larger collections of message boards. Reddit in particular tends to dominate the latter category, and is massively popular. The rpg discussions on Reddit are spread across many many dozens of subreddits (well over 100). See this big incomplete list.

Then there are all the Facebook groups, which aren't quite traditional message boards, but are basically the same thing, with less user-friendly threading. There is no telling how many of those exist, particularly when you consider the ones geared toward local gaming communities.

When it comes to the independent hobby-specific ones (like the Pub, Rpg.net, ENworld, etc.), it is common for them to have a relatively small percentage of people who are responsible for 90% of the posts, so if a couple of those folks move on you may see a huge drop in the number of posts each day. If you get a couple of new prolific posters join, the average number of posts may skyrocket. Overall, though, it is impossible to know whether the changes in the number of posts are in sync with the changes in readership numbers, unless the owner of the website posts those. Far more people read discussion boards than actively participate in them.

Of the various non-Reddit, non-Facebook message boards I frequent, the ones that have seen a big change in the frequency of posts over the last several years seem to be most affected by changes in moderation style or rules in general. That is true across the various hobby categories. Moderation style seems to have had a big effect on the various rpg ones I visit(ed). In other cases, changes to a few basic rules (ex. Fetlife disallowing discussion of a handful of topics) had a much bigger effect than the owners probably predicted.

In the end, though, message boards have always tended to have a limited lifespan. That was true in the 90s, as well. I can remember specific boards that were really, really busy for a couple of years, then just faded away, with no single apparent root cause. I suspect the main reason for Reddit's popularity is that it is a one-stop-shopping type of experience for message board participants and also offers a free, easy way for someone to set up a new board. When participation in one subreddit trails off, it just takes a few minutes for someone else to set up a new one and advertise it to tens of thousands of people. It is also relatively easy for someone new to take over moderation of a board that gets abandoned.
 
carpocratian said:
What I have seen is a decrease in the overall participation in hobby specific message boards that are on their own independent separate websites, but not on ones that are part of larger collections of message boards. Reddit in particular tends to dominate the latter category, and is massively popular. The rpg discussions on Reddit are spread across many many dozens of subreddits (well over 100). See this big incomplete list.
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Reddit is only superficially equivalent to a traditional forum. As mentioned, it does not allow for any sort of meaningful, ongoing discussion. It is designed to continually push discussion on to the next new thing.

It would take considerable effort to find a specific post from a week ago, and if you do find it, and try to continue the conversation, it's likely no one will ever know you've done so.
carpocratian said:
Then there are all the Facebook groups, which aren't quite traditional message boards, but are basically the same thing, with less user-friendly threading. There is no telling how many of those exist, particularly when you consider the ones geared toward local gaming communities.
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Again, "less user-friendly threading" is a massive understatement. Managing an ongoing or complex conversation is basically impossible. It is designed for a brief rant to harvest some likes and then you move on.
 
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Sharrow said:
But in practice, because you need an invite code/link, it's really just an #IRC server with bells and whistles, something that was considered quaint at the turn of the century.
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Some of us used to like mIRC:grin:!
 
As an aside. I liken Discord to being in a crowded convention hall. A lot of babble and hard to find anything definite easily. Also it can be a lot like World of Warcrafts Barrens Chat. Full of shit talk and general trolling. In other words Discord sucks.

wowwiki-archive.fandom.com

Barrens chat

Barrens chat is a condition which occurs when you have a large, sprawling area that is the primary means of leveling from 10-20. "Barrens chat is like a stupidity centrifuge, distilling the unexpurgated banal thoughts of a thousand morons into a hardened impenetrable lump of smacktardery...
wowwiki-archive.fandom.com wowwiki-archive.fandom.com
 
Sable Wyvern said:
Reddit is only superficially equivalent to a traditional forum. As mentioned, it does not allow for any sort of meaningful, ongoing discussion. It is designed to continually push discussion on to the next new thing.

It would take considerable effort to find a specific post from a week ago, and if you do find it, and try to continue the conversation, it's likely no one will ever know you've done so.

Again, "less user-friendly threading" is a massive understatement. Managing an ongoing or complex conversation is basically impossible. It is designed for a brief rant to harvest some likes and then you move on.
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Reddit, at least, is a traditional message board, at least in structure. The high volume of posts in the more popular subreddits - coupled with the "like" mechanism - do tend to push discussions out of the way pretty quickly, particularly if you aren't sorting on "new." That isn't as much of an issue on the lower volume ones, though, and I have seen older threads get resurrected on those. It isn't that difficult to find an older thread. Overall, though, I wasn't arguing that Reddit or Facebook are good substitutes for the independent forums. They aren't, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that you don't tend to get extended, in-depth discussions on them.
 
Endless Flight said:
The Pub hasn’t had a drop off. We’ve been pretty consistent the last seven years. I’ve posted stats in other threads to let everyone know how many members and posts we average every day. Surprising COVID didn’t really affect the Pub much. For instance since Jan of 22.
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New gamers find the pub, old gamers die

It's the circle of life, man
 
I never actually answered the question about which fora I visit, at present it is
here, reddit, BGG wargames, big purple (mainly read only), local games group discords, the miniatures page in approximate order of frequency.
In the old days I was very active on a number of mailing lists and I was very resistant to the move to forums, the thing that got me into them more broadly was the death of Google+. Discord seems a necessity these days but I dislike it. Reddit is IMO pretty good when you read it on new rather than hot. There are lots of fledgling players there seeking advice. It is cool to be able to point out stuff you have found great and be a counter-point to the OC illusionism advice that seems very common.
 
I found discord was great over Lockdown and how I got my rpg fix, but trying to use the One Page Rules Discord for information is pointless. You're either part of the ongoing conversation or you're a speedbump.
 
robb said:
I was very active on a number of mailing lists and I was very resistant to the move to forums, the thing that got me into them more broadly was the death of Google+. Discord seems a necessity these days but I dislike it.
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I really lament the death of Wave. And am still annoyed that Google didn’t release it like they promised so we could have federated servers.

Also …. Mastodon. Yeah. No.
 
lategamer said:
I really lament the death of Wave. And am still annoyed that Google didn’t release it like they promised so we could have federated servers.

Also …. Mastodon. Yeah. No.
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Wave was magnificent for a small group managing their RPG campaign talk. Seamless integration of chat and forum, the absolute best of both worlds.
 
Endless Flight said:
The Pub hasn’t had a drop off. We’ve been pretty consistent the last seven years. I’ve posted stats in other threads to let everyone know how many members and posts we average every day. Surprising COVID didn’t really affect the Pub much. For instance since Jan of 22.
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That doesn't really give all the stats though. For me, it's subjective, but the post count doesn't always tell you everything.

One reason I was thinking of this is that some other forum called this one boring. I don't agree in general, but I realize I haven't been reading it as much. I think a lot of that comes from my interests. At one time, the media forum seemed more lively. But its tone seemed to change. I notice people less discussing the actual Star Wars content than just hijacking the one thread with memes. The post counts might remain high, but if there's twelve posts that are just stuff somebody with a pithy one liner interruption (like the Pineapple on in this thread) and the follow-up to that, the post count might remain high and the signal to noise ratio shifts to the noise.

I'm not trying to say the forum has declined, but I do think it's less interesting that when I came here around 2018 or so. Maybe most people are happy with it. I just feel there's been a little too much silliness sometimes.

Voros said:
Like so much of the internet people seem to default to whatever is most popular even after #enshittification has settled in. I mean, Facebook is an abomination now, why so many users can't see that it exists to feed them shit advertisers and political vomit rather than connect them to friends and family is beyond me. Clearly, the user experience means shitall to Suckerberg.
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I think because it still does it's job, and it's a lot harder to get people to move to something else. I still have acquaintances of Facebook who've stayed, you just have to ignore the constant plugs.

sureshot said:
Unfortunately truly open place to have actual discussions online and out or few and far between. Which is why there is a decline.
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While that's true, I think all forums need some sort of moderation, otherwise it's just anarchy. The problem is the methods of moderation can vary.

Stan said:
For me, the good/bad of discord is that it's pretty private. I used discord as a game campaign website and we do our thing without anyone else bothering us. You can post files, have some threads for info and others for discussion, plus the video and voice built in. The downside for me is that I've never found a good discord site other than being invited.
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rumble said:
I'd say most companies tend to shift to Discord exactly because it's more ephemeral. Most companies don't like historical records unless they have total control. Discord is better for more fleeting conversations and finding people with like-minded interests in the moment.
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Perhaps this is why it's gaining in popularity. In the past, people had conversations about this stuff and it wasn't written down. Message Boards like this were probably only in existence since the 1970s (with BBS and other services). And I think as the consequences of social media are being found out now, people might want to embrace the "right to be forgotten". I remember a long time ago when usenet was still active (this had to be early 2000s), some media covering the latest batch of contestants for the CBS show Survivor found a few people asked where to score drugs on a usenet forum.

Even if this isn't the case, the Internet is going through an upheaval and not for the better. I think it's becoming a lot harder to find basic things because of Google's focus on ads rather than findability. At some point, I think the concept of search will decline and people will start looking for guidance from experts, since the whole system is going to decline into a lot of spam and little actual content. But that's a deeper subject.

Sable Wyvern said:
Teamspeak still exists.

I've ended up on Reddit. I've found it's not nearly as terrible as people make it out to be, but any conversation has a maximum life of about two days at most; after that the interface makes it basically impossible for meaningful conversation to continue. A really busy topic becomes broken into dozens of threads and impossible to follow within a day, while quieter ones just don't get seen.

Reddit is steadily being further enshittified, though, and it seems pretty clear the objective is to force everyone off the web platform and onto the app. When it becomes to much effort to use without the app, I will move on.

KenzerCo closed their forums down completely, and didn't even leave an archive up. From what I could see, they moved to Facebook of all places. That happened after I had already moved on, though, so didn't really affect me.
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I think a lot of this comes from simplifying the interface, that seems to be a thing once twitter came on board, people want to see a "stream" and not have to spend tons of time navigating things.

I wonder if the app is better than the interface on Reddit. I think a lot of problems from the new platforms come on how they are designed. Web development has changed greatly. In the past, you called a server and got HTML back, and that's still how most message boards work nowadays (I think the majority use PHP). Now, you have back end servers that will send JSON and front-end Single Page Apps that handle all transactions via JavaScript. I think a lot of this is reinventing the wheel needlessly, and some people can't cobble together a simple web site without installing 100 JS packages and setting up a local server, etc.

It just seems like we keep shifting technologies without good reason. The complaints against discord remind me of the similar complaints against web based message boards replacing the Newsgroups. The latter was a superior technology and the clients were great.

carpocratian said:
What I have seen is a decrease in the overall participation in hobby specific message boards that are on their own independent separate websites, but not on ones that are part of larger collections of message boards. Reddit in particular tends to dominate the latter category, and is massively popular. The rpg discussions on Reddit are spread across many many dozens of subreddits (well over 100). See this big incomplete list.

Then there are all the Facebook groups, which aren't quite traditional message boards, but are basically the same thing, with less user-friendly threading. There is no telling how many of those exist, particularly when you consider the ones geared toward local gaming communities.

When it comes to the independent hobby-specific ones (like the Pub, Rpg.net, ENworld, etc.), it is common for them to have a relatively small percentage of people who are responsible for 90% of the posts, so if a couple of those folks move on you may see a huge drop in the number of posts each day. If you get a couple of new prolific posters join, the average number of posts may skyrocket. Overall, though, it is impossible to know whether the changes in the number of posts are in sync with the changes in readership numbers, unless the owner of the website posts those. Far more people read discussion boards than actively participate in them.

Of the various non-Reddit, non-Facebook message boards I frequent, the ones that have seen a big change in the frequency of posts over the last several years seem to be most affected by changes in moderation style or rules in general. That is true across the various hobby categories. Moderation style seems to have had a big effect on the various rpg ones I visit(ed). In other cases, changes to a few basic rules (ex. Fetlife disallowing discussion of a handful of topics) had a much bigger effect than the owners probably predicted.

In the end, though, message boards have always tended to have a limited lifespan. That was true in the 90s, as well. I can remember specific boards that were really, really busy for a couple of years, then just faded away, with no single apparent root cause. I suspect the main reason for Reddit's popularity is that it is a one-stop-shopping type of experience for message board participants and also offers a free, easy way for someone to set up a new board. When participation in one subreddit trails off, it just takes a few minutes for someone else to set up a new one and advertise it to tens of thousands of people. It is also relatively easy for someone new to take over moderation of a board that gets abandoned.
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I think in general that part is correct that people prefer the one place method. I mean, the way the RPG forums are declining, most people have the same pseudonym at many different sites. That requires setting up accounts elsewhere, and just having to visit many places to get the same amount of conversation that you might have gotten in the past at one location.

I also agree with the fact that a handful of posters will make up the majority of the board, and the moderation issue. A bad or disliked moderator can have a fundamental impact, so too can losing a poster who is popular and active.

And you are right that setting up a new reddit would be a lot easier than an independent message board. The drawback is all these new things, Reddit, Discord, they are owned by a single company, not a general platform the Internet can use.


lategamer said:
New gamers find the pub, old gamers die

It's the circle of life, man
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That's one of the reason I posted -- I am actually wondering if people are not dying, but just opting out, deciding they won't spend time on these boards. I know as people age they have more responsibilities, and people get bored. So I'm kind of wondering if the older forums are experiencing that. Just people saying "no more" and doing something else.
 
sureshot said:
Another reason and possibly the elephant in the room is how many forums have turned into echo chambers. Where one must agree 10000% with the rest of the board on a topic of the board. Or one can get unilaterally banned. Moderation is very unfair and one sided.

Why would someone who wants to have an objective discourse or discussion go to such forums.

Beyond here, another side and certain FB groups many are too much of the above. In another topic I mentioned another rpg publisher forum where the words “ crunch and fluff” are no longer allowed to be use. On their forum. Almost everywhere they can be used. I can’t guarantee I will never ever hurt another rpg devs feelings.

I don’t go out of my way to be rude or hurtful if one writes an objectively bad product I will give constructive criticism.

Unfortunately truly open place to have actual discussions online and out or few and far between. Which is why there is a decline.
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I suspect this is as true of FB groups as it is of some Reddits as it is of some Discords. Assholes gonna hole no matter the media.
 
Other platforms:

In my internetting career, I've admittedly not as much experience with various platforms as others (until the 20teens I had viable reason for not putting a public profile on the internet), but almost all of my internet profiles I have created related to rpgs. Circa 2008 or so, I made a FB profile as part of a grad program I was in at the time but never actually posted something to it until 2015 or so. Use that one for various rpg groups until recently when FB decided their Groups Feed feature wasn't making them enough money so they decided to pretend it still works when it hasn't since late last year (a dozen rpg groups + an Ultharian cat group = FB saying "Nothing To Show Here" after flashing a hundred new posts across the various groups).

I've joined Discord a few times to check out the content about this game or that. Too much static, not enough signal. And for a platform called Discord, I haven't encountered any Self-Designated Popes nor a single fucking Golden Apple! I leave after a bit and forget what my profile name was so make a new one and try again. Same problems. I feel certain some group would have a nice balance but then if that's true there' should be a nice balance of assholes to decent people on the internet and that, at least anecdotally, is not true.

I mentioned my brief Twitter stint and even briefer Reddit experience in a post above... I was on the Neil Gaiman discussion board for a while 2002-03, which was awesome for discussing everything except Gaiman's work. I met a handful of people there in person (the core group organized some in-person meet-ups, which was a hesitantly good idea), and I miss the hundreds of pages in the Cabaret Voltaire thread where we bitched and bragged about failures and conquests.

On FB, the most innocuous game groups I've belonged to were the worst. I really want to call out one multiple-group/distantly-related to the game company person as being perhaps the worst offensive asshole I ever encountered on FB, but you never know who's reading posts, so I'll skip their name. On a Free League game group one Sunday morning, I had a Gun Porn Dude who had just joined the group with that profile earlier the same day (and FB earlier that week) appear and insult a bunch of people with gender/sexual denigrative comments and I told him he should maybe stick to Gun Porn Groups, and he went on on me in Group and in PM. Of course, reporting him to the Admin of the group and FB itself did nothing. And contacting the Admin moderator for at least four FL groups brought me a message back or "just ignore him" or "leave the group" ... so I left. Someone else I share a few FB groups with said the Admin and GPD are real life friends so real life friends can call people things like <<virulently derogatory things>> without remorse nor being curtailed, while on another game group the Admin likes to ban people (rightfully so) for things like that but then go on afterwards badmouthing the banned person, which isn't as bad but is still tasteless and childish. An admin for a 2d20 game likes to call the game publishers unsavory things and evidently, according to game publisher, FB doesn't allow a rights holder to have any say in how a group containing their name and trademarks is run. Well, unless you insult FB & Mark Z enough.

Which brings us back to posting groups like The Pub. Obviously, I like this place. It hits a balance of some shit-talking is okay, but boundaries DO exist. The Big Purple Bans you for not agreeing with the torches and pitchforks mob or for being a cosmopolitan traveller of the world who understands the difference before life experience and keyboard complainers. Reading old Big Puple threads, I've found the best ideas encountered are by the old accounts with red letters BANNED under their screen name. ENW was nice for a bit but I kept getting short temp bans from the same Moderator (some Mods can't ban you from the board but I've been banned from my own threads over there for saying things like "that idea isn't the smartest" -- Mod: You were abusive and insulting to that person! Thread Ban! And then the same Mod and same "victim" again in another thread and another ban for me). Criticizing an idea is not the same as criticizing the person. But Mods who are (again) personal friends with someone is a very minor reflection of say... a Supreme Court Injustice not excusing themselves from a case in which they hold personal involvement.

Personally, my internet experience peaked with email groups in the early 2000s. Most posts were thought out and composed well. Some were glorious knee-jerk reactions. and a few were trolling. In most email groups, trolls were quickly identified and easily weeded out. The Husband, before he was a husband, was a moderator for two astounding groups--The Drunken Boat, a Rimbaud/Baudelaire/Verlaine-based group that was a spectacular group of international people back in Sept 2001; honest, poetic, compassionate, and almost exclusively non-nationalistic. Another group was based on the ideology, not novel nor film, of Fight Club. Okay... full disclosure: It was a group for articulate trolls. Both of these email groups had people I met in so-called real life, including a guy from the Emirates who was about the fifth funniest person I've ever encountered (Carlin and Hicks topping that list).

Well, now I've written a short story here (I blame this morning's three cups of coffee in more than a week), I'll answer directly what was asked on the tin. Yes, I do think the internet in general has hit the inflection point of decline in many areas. It's had troublesome teenage years and now that it is 25+, I think a lot of its past interests have diminished in favor or the newer trendier things. At some point it will regress into retro-nostalgia and websites will take on the look of late 90s internet pages again. Each phase with new lingo and what's hep with the cats these days. 'Scuse me, I know I'm showing my age'n all, but Boomer still only means two things: post-War babies and big long phallic water tubes filled with seamen that is capable of shooting enough radioactive spunk to make global ovary eggs explode. :shock: :shade:
 
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JRT said:
That doesn't really give all the stats though. For me, it's subjective, but the post count doesn't always tell you everything.
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Well, there’s also active users, meaning the number of different people who log in every day. Since April 24, 2017, the day the Pub opened. In the case of the OGL scandal, it helped the Pub, because our active user number saw a pretty big push. If ever saw this number flatline or go down that would make me worry but fortunately it has only gone up.

47334925-E0B5-4E35-8505-3CD24B01580B.jpeg

We averaged 35 members log in every day our first full month. This month we are averaging a record 285 members log in. We hit 100 members a day in 2018 and 200 members a day in 2021. So basically every three years we jump 100 members. Compared to some places this might be peanuts but it’s steady growth. I personally believe the top posters are posting less recently and it’s spread out more than it ever has been before.
 
Sable Wyvern said:
Teamspeak still exists.

I've ended up on Reddit. I've found it's not nearly as terrible as people make it out to be, but any conversation has a maximum life of about two days at most; after that the interface makes it basically impossible for meaningful conversation to continue. A really busy topic becomes broken into dozens of threads and impossible to follow within a day, while quieter ones just don't get seen.

Reddit is steadily being further enshittified, though, and it seems pretty clear the objective is to force everyone off the web platform and onto the app. When it becomes to much effort to use without the app, I will move on.

Discord is ok for casual chatting, which makes sense given it's a chat platform. Everyone else has already covered the issues with discord as a primary repository or knowledge and discussion.

The Pub is pretty much the only forum I frequent these days. I spent a fair bit of time on the Design Mechanism forums from 2013 - 2015 (ish), but the useful discussion is mostly on discord these days and, unfortunately, they got sucked into signing their souls over to Tapatalk, which is forums at their worst. I was on RPGnet for a long time, and it was hard to move on even after I came to despise the place, but once the initial withdrawals passed, I was much better for it. EnWorld was the first forum I spent any time on (just before RPGnet). I returned briefly just recently, but it's not really the place for me any more.

KenzerCo closed their forums down completely, and didn't even leave an archive up. From what I could see, they moved to Facebook of all places. That happened after I had already moved on, though, so didn't really affect me.
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Kenzer Co also has a discord
 
JRT said:
It just seems like we keep shifting technologies without good reason. The complaints against discord remind me of the similar complaints against web based message boards replacing the Newsgroups. The latter was a superior technology and the clients were great.
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At one point Steve Jackson Games had a web forum for their Pyramid magazine subscribers (before they had an openly available, free, web forum). The nice thing about it was that is used the newsnet protocol, so you could log in with a newsreader client, or use a web browser to log into their forum front end. IT was, IMO, the best of both worlds.

These days if you can log in with an 'app' it'll be a custom one and almost certain just a nobbled web browser anyway, so it offers no advantage to the user over just using a web browser.
 
I can't speak to forums in general, but I do know this is the only one (on any topic, not just rpgs) where I actively participate. There are a few others I occasionally visit, but almost always just to read. For me, I'd mostly rather be out doing active things than sitting at my computer.

Most of the rpg campaigns I'm in have their own private Discord servers, and I find Discord useful for that purpose. I've also tried a few public Discords for specific systems, but I haven't gotten much out of them.
 
Endless Flight said:
Well, there’s also active users, meaning the number of different people who log in every day. Since April 24, 2017, the day the Pub opened. In the case of the OGL scandal, it helped the Pub, because our active user number saw a pretty big push. If ever saw this number flatline or go down that would make me worry but fortunately it has only gone up.

View attachment 81509

We averaged 35 members log in every day our first full month. This month we are averaging a record 285 members log in. We hit 100 members a day in 2018 and 200 members a day in 2021. So basically every three years we jump 100 members. Compared to some places this might be peanuts but it’s steady growth. I personally believe the top posters are posting less recently and it’s spread out more than it ever has been before.
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I'm pretty sure I post a lot less than I used to. Someone has been picking up my slack and I appreciate it!
 
Endless Flight said:
I know which people at which forum called the Pub “boring” and that’s rich seeing what that place has become over the last ten years.
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imo usually when someone posts something along those lines, it’s because they are unhappy the PUB stay neutral and apolitical imo.

Those so called more “ exciting “ forum tend to have their on respective positions on politics and usually pick a side. With those in charge expecting every poster to fall in line.

Give me the so called “ boring “ pub any day.
 
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