The Future of Forums?
 

Does anyone think that forums will be supplanted by a future medium?

Maybe when another medium is developed that allows the users to communicate freely with all the abilities of forums and of course more features then yes, forums will be replaced by new technology.

Its the laws of just about everything else. Something is only good, until something better comes along.

While they may possibly be replaced by something else in future, that does depend a lot on a variety of factors including cost and topic. Like some people will always prefer the kind of discussion that forums provide, in the same way that Usenet and IRC and mailing lists are still around, just not as popular. Then there's the small factor that the technology would have to be somewhat cheap to allow it to become taken up by many communities, and if it wasn't, those with less budget would have to stick with the alternatives. The other question is the future of vBulletin at that time...

Licenses will be free!?!?! :D

I really hope not..... I happy paying for mine. If they were to make it free, then anyone ANYONE can install it.

reminds me of phpbb.... *shudders*

Well, vBulletin will never become free. It's become too complex.

Obviously, as time goes on, more and better things will be born. Look at a technology for an example; changing ever so quickly.

Forums are already no where near as active and popular as they were 5 years ago. I don't know that forums are even necessary on most of my site ideas anymore.

I used to want to buy vB license after vB license. Now I have two owned licenses that are gathering dust right now.

IMO, if Jelsoft doesn't do something about their mindset (making vB myspace), and stop adding all these pointless features, I don't see sales being as good as they have been in the past. But you know, what do I know? I don't see the numbers.

Please no. How many more features could be crammed into vBulletin? Seriously?

With 3.7 it seems that Jelsoft has run out of ideas and features to better the forum, and instead have thrown in an attempt to make a myspace social networking clone. What they NEED to focus on is making vB css friendly. PHPBB's theme is light years ahead of vB right now, and that is something I would have never thought I'd be saying now.

But anyways, back on topic: Don't ever be surprised if anything on the web gets replaced. The internet is a very young technology, and things come and go all the time.

KTB, that's pretty interesting... I do agree... A lot of social mediums, like facebook, have forums and I do a lot of discussion on other things than forums these days...

I think that digg and reddit have replaced a lot of general discussion-type forums

I think that whatever decline forums had to face, they already faced it. I don't foresee any major setback for forums.

The biggest slap forums got worldwide is the start of social networking websites. But I think now things got stable.

Blogs became strong, but they did not pose that much of a danger to forums.

They do, absolutely.. and I don't use facebook, but I imagine that the forums aren't the main focus that drives the site by any means.. and I wouldn't be surprised if sites like Facebook deprecate their forums over time.

As you said, "social" sites have many other ways of discussing topics, and right now, forums seem to be coming off as "old news" to a lot of people who are putting sites up.

I don't know percentage statistics or anything.. I'm just going off of what I have seen with my own eyes here.

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But you don't see a future for anything different than Social Networking and blogs? As I stated earlier, the internet is very young. Anything new can happen.. HTML, CSS, and any programming language can and does get replaced by some new technology..

Think, ten years ago forums and message board didn't even exist on the internet. Neither did community user systems of any sort. They're all young and they're all evolving. Ten years from now there could be so many things done differently and ran differently.. it's crazy.

Saying that you think forums have declined as much as they ever will is, in my opinion, completely ignorant. You're not looking at a big picture here.

KTBleeding, if I didn't elaborate into technicalities, that doesn't mean that my opinion is ignorant.

Sure there are many things hidden to the future, but most will fall at refining things. You mentioned HTML, CSS, etc. it's correct that they evolve and add a lot of new things, but that doesn't mean that they are all breakthroughs, they are refinements. Only the first idea was a breakthrough.

Social Networking on the other hand is a breakthrough, Forums were a breakthrough at some time. Forums will evolve but will remain forums. In my opinion, with the strong invasion of social networking, forums got the biggest setback, but they proved two things to me:

1- They will always remain, they will evolve, get refined, change in aspect, but remain forums.
2- The quality of forums improved after the emergence of social networking websites. For the simple fact that people who want to waste their and other people's times by silly posting went to social networks, whether people who are willing to discuss more or less seriously stayed loyal to forums. That's a very general opinion, but it still holds some truth.

In the end, what defines a forum? It's a space where people can discuss, with protected anonymity their ideas, where they can elaborate, and most of all, the contents are all archived. Something that neither chatting, social networking, or blogging can provide. And this CONCEPT of forums will always remain, no matter what technology hides.

Moreover, with the increasing alarming voices against personal information diffusion, forums are quite an important refuge, and I wouldn't be surprised to see people "moving back" to forums.

what i see is a dedicated forum community disappearing. there are too many websites out there and too many communities that it's hard for any one "forum only" page to truly succeed. More often than not we need these extra features as a means to draw people to return. Forums make a great addition to existing sites but not so much as the core anymore.

as i see it at least

I'd agree on the personal information part. That's why I personally never go anywhere near social networking sites like Myspace or Facebook, because of the kind of stuff people share there, and the laughable ideas I heard online about people claiming their website designers because they made a Myspace page...

The personal information angle is also what worries me about these so called forum replacements, because voice and video based systems give out a whole load of personal information that many people I know wouldn't actually want to disclose to the general public.

So yeah, I do kinda agree there will always be forums, and I don't plan to ever move away from the forum style system online, or text based chat in general (as in text + pictures + cool stuff, not as in plain text).

Still don't think the invention of Myspace and such like has improved forum quality, at least in the forums I've seen. It may be because of the subject matter though.

I agree in part. I don't like forum only sites to be honest, and do prefer sites which actually have nice, written content to go along with a forum as well as maybe a few other features, since the amount of forum only sites reminds me of the vast amount of forums (especially free ones) with no real content trying to compete in saturated markets and shutting down within a week...

this is the folley of many a web master. I call it the field of dreams folly.

"if we build it, They will come". Forums such as this generally fail. Unless you have a core group of users that love each other from somewhere else, there wont be a draw.

My forums are a tricky case. We're a dedicated forums built around hockey Goaltending. We at least have a common grasp, However, there are others with us in this field. We've had to try and stand out against others. we've linked up with an equipment manufacturer so that users can find out how things are made and get deals. We've got an NHL goalie coach posting so that people can actually get information and articles from a professional. Without stuff like this we would have easily dissappeared as just "another goalie forum"

Despite those things too, there's still the strive to increase the community. as a stand alone forum it's hard to do. I'm always looking for ways of adding ontop of the forum with thigns to draw people. we've got classifieds and a chat. Still it's not enough as everyone wants to do everything in one place.

My next step is to do exclusive content hosting such as video's.

I'd agree, but mainly on the article and classifieds and chat and just stuff. Just the fact it seems your site has information of use and is more than a forum provides a draw. I would never join most forums since they're just social chit chat half the time with no relevant content. I even drew up an article a few weeks back saying the same...

I like forums because discussion is over a longer period. Also I don't mind paying for vBulletin because it has a reasonable price tag and isn't over-priced like a certain competitor IPB. VBulletin speaks quality and the staff are a decent bunch when you need help. You can find thousands of free templates and modifications. So for a while at least I can't see forums going down the drain. Also if you haven't noticed vBulletin is constantly evolving, now it's going to have more Social features because we are in a Social Networking era, something that constantly changes will live to be competitive. the vBulletin developers are sure on the ball.

I have to agree with the helpfulness of the VB staff. I posted a request for help about a hack, and ScottM was good enough to trawl through my access logs and find out just what had happened.

As to the future, I don't know what it will hold. Social networking is just the current state of affairs, whereas Internet fora have always brought together people from all over the world. I honestly don't see what more can be done, but some beggar will be devious enough to invent something.

VBTube, anyone? VBazaa?

Can't see it, but maybe someone will add file sharing or similar to their code...

Rapscallion

I think that the height of forums was last year... which is why Jelsoft was sold