[RichieBoy67]

Originally Posted by BigJimTheLug

Forums are not dead.
Facebook, and Google have not killed forums.

All Facebook, and Google did was take away all the young kids, and centralized their social media habits. This is really great since young people tend to type horrific English, which in turn, hurts your website overall.


Forumming is not dead. If your traffic is down, you have to find a way to revitalize your niche either using artificial means such as artificial intelligence combined with algorithms, or other tricks of the trade to start dynamic discussions and build a user base.

Social media will never destroy niche forums.

I agree that forums are not dead and in general will never die but it is much more challenging these days to start and run one. As for taking kids away I disagree. There are more forums relating to kids then ever before, minecraft forums, etc. Not only that but people of all ages use FB.

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Originally Posted by Dave

I also want to say that on my gaming forum, the activity rates go up a lot when there's a chatbox. Without a chatbox some people don't even bother staying online for > 15 minutes.

While a chatbox may keep people on your forum it is not really adding any useful content in terms of search rank so it is not getting anyone knew to your forum. Also, those people who are chatting in your shoutbox are most likely not posting as much in your forums.

It could be good though as you said to keep people there longer and maybe it helps keep the gossip out of the forums too. I guess on some sites they may work well but I just have never had any luck using shoutboxes. The added resource usage was just never worth it and I always saw a decline in forum posts. I could see it working well though on a gaming forum.