A few years ago I would have been in the camp that says facebook doesn't affect forums, but now I am witness to facebook nearly destroying one of my forums. In my specific forum demographic members would rather use facebook purely from a convenience standpoint. It's really amazing. I can't believe what I am seeing. They don't care about privacy or that my forum offers more. To them FB is easier.

HEre in Portugal, Facebook is literally killing internet forums... :down:

Internet Brands' vBulletin division presented an interesting graph on this topic at last year's ForumCon conference. See slide 4 of this presentation:
http://www.slideshare.net/VigLink/ig...ion-forum-maus

For our business we recently ran an analysis of over 50,000 vBulletin sites and found that over 50% of the sites had increasing traffic rank.

We see lots of sites using Facebook to complement thieir vBulletin-powered forum in successful ways. One site leaping to mind is NSXPrime:
NSXPrime | NSXPrime Facebook page

Social media is really killing the impact of forums now a days.... its better to connect forums via social media tools to have a equally importance as of social media

It would be great to hear some more opinions about this matter, now that Facebook Groups are getting so popular...

I maintain my opinion stated last May: Facebook is killing Internet Forums. :(

I used to get 1200 posts per day. Now 1 every few days. All the small talk went over to facebook which people used to do on my site. They also like to be able to delete posts that dont agree with them, where on my site, if people disagreed with you, you'd be trolled. Theres a reason Facebook doesnt have an 'unlike' button and allows you to delete posts on your wall and ban people. People like that power.

IMO, forums can easily co-exist with Facebook. Obviously, you have to adapt to the changing environment.

Let say you received a ton of page views from people having casual conversations on your forum. Well there are much better mediums for people to have casual conversations. In most cases, you can't expect to offer someone an inferior service and gain traction. Rest assured that quality sites see the reverse effect; they gain traffic from FaceBook.

Think, what does your site offer people? You should have several advantages over FaceBook; Quality content, articles, in-depth analysis, custom coded features, etc. There are several things that you can offer that are dedicated to your specific niche that FaceBook can't.

Some like the more enclosed community while others are exhibitionists showing themselves to total strangers. I haven't really like FB since I opened an account there over 2 years ago. I used it on my anime website and all I got was bots and no new members. I dropped it off my forum and have not gone back to FB. Only thing that will take me back now is to close the account.

No, facebook can not kill forums if you are doing well with your forum, visitors will come. I am owning a forum and it's enlarging day by day.

Hard work always pays, so work hard to get your forum up and on track :)

If you integrate facebook, that could be an asset. I know someone who created a facebook page . He posts his selected threads in there simultaneously. That in turn gives him shares and more people get access to forums, then register and comment

You are of course referring to Facebook integration using the built in options in the admin cp?

I'm not a coder but I can't help but to believe there has to be a better way or, some enhancements to what the vb admin options shows.

I personally believe there is no doubt that Facebook has herded a large percent of web users but, a well designed forum with content that fills a niche of the public, can kick some serious butt.

I have concentrated for so long on the design of my site thinking it would attract users. After all the work I did to my site, I gave it all up and went with a purchased style.

I love my site even though I only have very few members and the ones I have aren't active. The Facebook group I have is growing every day.

Yes. The built-in integration works fine. Just by sharing one of your articles makes it appears on your friends wall. If they want to see more they click on the link. This guy did a nice job http://riflecompetition.com/

Hi Gary,

My daughter uses Facebook to bring her users to her small board, otherwise she would be in the same boat. She has only 800 users, a third are very active -- her school and her friends. Without the Facebook tie-in she would have almost none. It is much easier for her to add large content on her board so she likes that, yet it is clear that the young age group prefers the ease of Facebook with it's mobile features. Unfortunately, all of it looses out to plain ol' text messaging. I wrote an app to send SMS messages to and from her board, but it really has not caught on. As Facebook grows and features grow it might be a hard sell, but my daughter still has more fun with her board.

The large board I oversee is a corporate board, which the users are forced to use. We recently (over the last year) have added a social aspect to it where the users can now interact with social media as kind of an experiment to bring brand awareness of the company. Outside users cannot sign-up, but inside users can post external Facebook events to the company system and vice-versa. I am kind of curious what I will learn from this interaction. For some reason the employees think we are more progressive by having this kind of tie-in and it brings a little company pride -- don't ask me why.

In the business world mobile is everything, our employees use their mobile phone two to one over their desktops for posting messages. This is where I have concentrated our concern in our IT department. Internal employee interaction and communication is vital to the company.

It is clear that Facebook is a major player and you cannot ignore it when designing a site like yours. On the other-hand it does not do everything well, and to me not nearly as fun to play around with. In my opinion merge your site with social media, have great content on your board and the really active users will slowly come. I think Facebook is a great tool to feed your site, but it might take a while.

Not really. People makes forums to share specific information.

My forum activity has dropped dramatially over past 2 years. My users want IMMEDIATE and EASY ability to post. Its so extremely simple to take a picture/post immediately to Facebook.

I like the advice in this thread regarding posting poplular threads to my FaceBook page, and refer then back to the site for more info/postings. Makes sense, except its not a living site then, it will force me to engage daily on FB.

Since I am currently using 3.8.1, are there any upgrades within VB which allow functional integration---which this community truly likes? I'm hearing that the Bots/crawlers from FB are not friendly with our forums.

With any of the VB Versions / Mods, can I simply add an APP with my VB site to my users phones, so they can immediately take photo/post to my forum?

If I'm posting in the wrong area, please let me know:)

People not knowing forums anymore in my country. All is facebook. It conquered everything. As vbskins seller sales figure are very bad.

for forum to survive it has to have ajax ability like facebook, post in instance no need reply button just enter keyboard. No need quick reply box like forum has.

What about when you offer a forum service which for user safety reasons, you need to limit social media integration? For example part of our safety policy bans users posting any of their identifiable social media links. In some ways it stops people being able to communicate with each other elsewhere but at the same time limits how we can push our service, a double edged sword.

we are nearing 2015 now and its evident.. forums are dying!

Tell that to my forum's members lol ... Our forums are very busy, today already we have had over 250 new posts which includes new threads which are probably about 25 new threads ....

If you target your intended genre the right way forums will stay very active... heck look at Vb.org, these forums here are pretty active ....

I previously wrote in this thread about my daughters board, it went from 800 users to 23,000 (this last year) with 1200 active users a day. She does not try to compete against Facebook, instead she embraces the diversity. All of her members use Facebook to chat (in fact they must for registration), they go to her board for real content and the closeness of the private community.

Look at the number of cell phone forums, and most of them are doing pretty well. They shouldn't be as they are quite boring in unique content, but the topic is hot and the need for shared information is great. So for the time being they are thriving ... until the death of the product cycle.

Facebook will be here, until it is not. Create your strategy around that fact. If you are trying to compete against Facebook, why? You are never going to convince users to drop Facebook and come to your board. At best they will do both, each with their own unique strengths.

I liked @BBNZowner comment above, it showed he has a unique strategy. If you are looking at forums as a business, you cannot just stamp-out more metal paper clips without have a unique strategy for distribution of your product and a method to capture market share, or you will just end up having a garage full of paper clips.

Forum software is just a tool, keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish. :)

Yep embrace mobile and social, or most definitely die.

Our activity at MBA forum has dropped considerably and I just can't get my head around "strategy" to get it buzzing again. I'd love to have someone on board who can do that for me :)

Nice site, but it is living in the desktop era not the mobile / Facebook era. Your future audience (if not now) will be mobile. Examine your current competition and reposition your web site. We live in a world of quick information and conveying of ideas, your site needs to provide it, or new potential users will not return. You have an educated audience, find out their frustrations with your site and use new member responses only, not loyal board members.

Forum software and forum owners are not adapting to the faster pace world out there. Modern sites are costly to run and time consuming due to the interfacing of technology and fast moving trends. Your loyal board members will always be there, but as they switch to the mobile environment you need to be able to welcome them with an improved interface.

You should be positioning yourself to be one of the (5-10) apps the average mobile customer uses on their device daily. Forum software has a need out there, but it must serve at the convenience to the customer.

To all of this I would add, start paying attention to your WoL page, look at the user agent strings. Check out how many people are accessing your site with mobile browsers, you will be stunned. You have to get mobile browser friendly or you will lose this vast majority of online users. Check my profile for a little shortcut template edit for v3 I posted, that makes UA strings show up automatically for the admins, in WoL.

Cater to the mobile devices, or die.

Thanks, I've been searching for how I can make the mobile thing possible for 3 days now. I'm not able to get much information on how vbulletin 3.8.3 version can be made mobile ready. There's something called MAPI or mobile styles but since official vbulletin.com has stopped supporting it, all links to it are dead.

I've opened a thread here yesterday : https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=314379

Any inputs on it would be much appreciated by people like me :)

Stop making things difficult for yourself, go to https://tapatalk.com/ , create an account and install it on your forums ... My members love this app and it is very easy to use my Man ... try it out you wont be disappointed ...

Dunno how it would work with his 3.8.2, he definitely should consider upgrading to 3.8.7 at least if not 3.8.8.

He's on 3.8.3 Max...or am I reading wrong? His forum's footer also says 3.8.3 as well ...

3.8.2 or 3.8.3 is not much of a difference. Either way, 3.8.8 is the version to run.

Hi, thanks for the recommendation. I read about tapatalk but then also read that members have to pay for downloading the app. Most of my users are from India where people do not easily pay for apps.

Does Tapatalk render a mobile website or is it only for an app.

I'm on vb 3.8.3

You might also want to look up mobile styles here, for 3.8.x, there are some decent ones. There's also a Mod that detects mobile browsers and feeds them only the style you designate.

What links are dead?

Support is still available for VB 3.x.

In order to get the Mobile API for VB 3.x you must purchase the VB Mobile Suite. That will allow you to create forum apps for iOS and Android, but they don't work great on customized forums- you would be better off downloading the lightweight style by Dartho for 3.x.

Thanks for helping BirdOPrey .. I did install this style but it did not look good on my android mobile.

I clicked on the link in a discussion that pointed to MAPI on vbulletin.com and it was dead. Can you please point me in the right direction / purchase page.

Yep, when I really push Facebook with new content I can get over 10% traffic just from there! Add In Google+, Pinterst and Twitter and we are talking about a very large amount of traffic.

Without knowing the exact link it's hard to know where it is supposed to point. The MAPI is only available for 3.x if you purchase the mobile suite-

http://www.vbulletin.com/en/mobile/

There is no documentation for the MAPI, if you want to use it you must figure that out yourself- there is no official support.

purchased the plugin. installed and could not get it to work. created a ticket. let's see if support can help trouble shoot.

Is Facebook killing forum? Here is the answer. As of November 1st that will no longer be free.
http://nationalreport.net/facebook-b...-users-2-99mo/

Mass desertions ahead

Ya knew it was a matter of time before they started charging people.

Don't believe everything you read. Facebook AD revenues can easily pay for their service they offer for free. You have to look no further than their quarterly's. :)

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...w/43151841.cms
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/social-netwo...me-soon-596081