https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/14-general-talk/446998-fall-posting-pentax-forums-over-years.html
@PurpCat Dwarf Fortress still holds their discussions on their own forums to this very day.
@Corfiot @PurpCat People don't realize that part of the reason why forums declined was that a lot of forums had the worse moderation while sites like Reddit, Digg, or the comment section of YouTube were much more lax at the time. Seriously, forums would immediately ban you just for using words that you can't say on American Daytime TV while sites like YouTube at the time could have you get away with words like "faggot". It was especially pointless as most forums required users to be at least 13 years old anyway.
There were also other bullshit policies like policies against necrobumping, which were pointless as topics do eventually become relevant again with new information. Or admins banning discussions that they *think* are illegal but are not. I remember a lot of gaming forums banning people for merely mentioning the existence of emulators (which aren't even illegal in of itself), not even asking or distributing ROMs. They didn't even mentioned downloading ROMs. They could've even dumped the ROMs themselves for all we know, but they still got banned.
Forums were able to get away with their abusive moderation because they are much smaller with the largest forums having around 10,000 or maybe even 100,000 active users at best. It's basically the same reason why Mastodon instances are able to enforce rules that are more strict than Jack Dorsey's Twitter.
In many cases the takeover was mental; as we well know there were only a very few cases of people being injected into communities or being flipped by police contact. Most people who went through these major ideological shifts freely chose to become that way, and the higher-up they were when they changed, the more effective they were in effecting change.
Many of them are like Tyler Malka with NeoGAF where he's been called a snake due to his 180 on rules and even registrations when the woke audience dumped his site.
For example so many old school forums with shit admins would janny you for bumping an old thread or "necroposting" or discussing stuff they merely thought was illegal.
It's why say PokeCommunity has a thriving community compared to BMGf or SPPf, because they would talk about something banned on both (romhacks/fangames). Ditto with sites like Project Pokemon that focused on reverse engineering.
@WALFTEAM @PurpCat @Corfiot Yes and no. Forums are simple enough to be hosted on a shared hosting service, unlike Fediverse instances which are better off (or out right required) being hosted on a VPS. Even the most popular modern forum software, XenoForo is still written in PHP. And many hosts these days have autoinstallers for packages like phpBB and WordPress, so you don't need to learn things like SSH or FTP.
Granted, I have never actually hosted a forum (outside of testing forum software that I wrote myself almost a decade ago and have lost the source code to since), but I think the biggest problem that forum admins had to deal with is spam. I remember phpBB having the most basic captchas (if you can even call them that). It could be simple as clicking on a checkbox. And I remember back when Reddit was becoming more popular, the common argument of hosting their discussions on there over a forum was the spam issue.
Though, even with basic captchas, you can still handle the spam problem with an active moderation team, filtering out certain email domains (.biz domains are known for spam and abuse), among other things.
Other than that, you have to deal with eventually having to change servers or upgrade your hosting plan if your forum is popular for a long time. It's probably why most forums required you to upload images to a separate server like Photobucket instead of uploading images directly.
https://libranet.de/profile/peter_weyand/
and maybe something else fairly soon, of what GNU social v3 should have been.
