Are admin forums deader than disco?

And if you don't know what exactly deader than disco means, well, TV Tropes says it like such:

Or in longer form, something that's popular which gets overdone to death, turned on by the majority and ends up seen as something people don't regard highly any more.

I suspect admin forums in general may have come under this trend. Not all of them (The Admin Zone, Admin Talk and Another Admin Forum may have avoided it), but for the most part, it seems the rule holds out. Admin forums are nowhere near as popular or liked as they used to be, and are becoming seen as almost a boring cliche on the same level as 'it was a dark and stormy night', Myspace and bad sprite comics.

Just look at all the admin forums which have basically died in recent years:

Admin Fusion: Dead as a dodo
Admin Addict: Same
Top Admin: Gone from active to about 0 posts a day
Admin Peak: Mostly inactive, kept alive by a very small group of people.
AdminForums: Was very active, now gets about four posts a day
Forum University: No posts since 2013

And the list goes on. Pretty much every admin forum online bar maybe two or three is just about stone dead.

So what did them in? I say it's probably a mix of a few things:

1. A tiny audience over catered to by tens or hundreds of competing forums. Basically, supply outstripped demand in this niche. Kind of like an internet financial bubble. Or maybe I guess as some would say, none of the admins owning these sites realised they were competing in a 'red ocean' scenario where each post was merely taking activity from the competitors and vice versa rather than drawing new people.

Or heck, for that matter, kind of like the Great Video Game Crash in the US. The picture from TV Tropes showing all the different versions of QBert (all completely identical bar minor differences) could probably also work for admin forums, showing a bunch of those with almost all identical content and topics with the same userbase, general style and very few actual differences. Same result, endless competitors all trying to get the same people, offering nothing unique and splitting a small audience fifty odd ways.

2. The decline in forum popularity in general. If there's anyone that's worse for than forum owners, it's sites trying to make more and get traffic by catering to forum owners.

But what do you think? Are admin forums now genuinely deader than disco, outside of this site and a few other exceptions?

 

Hmm, to be fair I think Admin Addict only peaked back to life because of the XenForo court trial and a few of us using the site to talk about it their because all other forums wouldn't and that was mainly because they USED XenForo and was somewhat bias towards what was allowed to be said about XF. That resulted in Admin Addict being the place to go and talk about it, why me and Mark went their after first using Admin Extra but then stopping because threads kept getting locked about it.

After the court trial ended Admin Addict went back to being it's usual self again. So think it's important to bare in mind why AA peaked when it did, and for what reason. It was always going to be a short lived, which proved to be the case in the end after the XF trial ended.

 

Don't think it's a case that people have got fed up of Admin sites, think it's more about people in general not using forums as much. It's across the board really no matter what niche you cover. But admin forums are being highlighted over it, because that's what most of us use here and see it happening on. I mean, look how many users TAZ gets online now compared to a year ago, or two years ago. The site has taken a big drop in users, yet it's still one of the better admin forums to go use first.

Those users gone cannot be seen using other admin forums like this one, or others, they didn't switch admin sites. They have simply gone, and that's the problem now with people losing interest in wanting to use forums for discussion.

 

Another reason forums do bad. I just replied to you AWS on your forum, also quoted CM30 with a reply who supports this forum more than any other admin forum he visits. Both of you was logged-in at the time and have logged out. You see, this is why I don't bother wasting my time much posting on other admin forums anymore, which I did used to post on a lot more.

 

I think the XF and vBulletin lawsuit drove a lot of traffic to admin forums, but since then there really hasn't been much action on a lot of admin forums. This could be because of various reasons, some users may have moved on and learned what they had to learn, so they just focus on their own online communities now instead of chatting. Or, it could be because not a whole lot of new topics are being posted, so there's less to discuss. I remember when theadminzone's the exchange forum used to be quite popular for post exchanges, but now people use Postloop or Forumpromotion to find new people to exchange with. There's also a lot more admin/webmaster forums than they were a few years ago, so a lot of users are spread out on various forums.

 

honestly, there are just way too many admin forums...It's kind of like Gaming forums or Naruto forums.....


Adex, The Admin zone and here are my 3 main sites I use...I also have accounts at

1. Adminforums.org which has essentially turned into a spam haven

2. Another Admin Forum-- Haven't been there in awhile. It's a nice site just never really pulled me in....I used it in my early days of learning software and admin stuff(2012)

3. TOp Admin and ADmin peak

In all honesty there are just too many sites and not enough to differentiate them. It has nothing to do with forums dying in popularity, that is an exaggeration.

For starters...for whatever reason, most admin sites are now ALL on Xenforo. Which means, despite different skins, the sites all virtually look and perform the same(that's one thing about XF that bugs me is that the sites more or less look the same). So there is not much of an identity for a lot of sites.

Secondly, they all tend to use some of the same add-ons & resources....and features...once again, not much setting them apart from other sites in the niche

Third, the content really is not that much different.

Most of the same people i see here are the same people i see on other admin forums..and they are essentially discussing the same ol same ol...with nothing new being added.

The niche is to overexposed and not enough sites are offering anything compelling and they are all redundant. It's like Social networks...All these social networks are trying to be the next FB, the next instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, etc etc but they instead are essentially replicas of something that has already been established and there are so many of these types of apps out there, that people tend to not care about them anymore because they overexposed.

Same can be said for type of music. Types of movies...I am a big reader and the market became flooded with vampire related fiction in the 2000s to the point people literally stopped caring about them as much and have moved on to other things.

Admin forums need to evolve and differentiate themselves...There really is not much difference between AT and Adex.

Personally, I like Adex and TAZ but it is utterly redundant that Howard keeps them both separately because on their own neither really is doing much to grow....Make them one and evolve them.

I like AT for the laidback community but I hope to see some diversity to make the site the go to site. @AWS is a laid back gentleman and i've seen him on various forums and he knows his stuff. I am also fairly familiar with @cpvr from doing exchanges and speaking with him off and on over the past year or two.. Good Guy. People like @BamaStangGuy @GTB @Mark and @CM30 are also people, i may not have spoken with personally, but are knowledgeable and I learned a lot from observing them being that i am only 18...Hell, I have never used Vbulletin and never plan to but i have learned years of history about Vbulletin from watching the drama unfold from a lot of these people xD...but these are also the same people i see on multiple sites. Thus nowadays it's sort of like old news since i see generally the same posts on every admin site i visit.

Generally speaking nowadays....Every admin site i visit has

"Vbulletin Sucks...."

"Xenforo is the best software ever...GOLLY GEE..."

^Really...is this really all we have to talk about these days? I doubt that. But this is a common theme on Adex, At, and TAZ and I am willing to be other sites. Which is why i rarely partake in posting since there isn't much to discuss....other than the same rehashed topics that are old news.

What admin forums(and forums in general) is to diversify and evolve and stop sort of following the pack.

 

I agree there are more admin forum around than before not helping. But don't see people switching from using one to another, such as activity dying back on one admin forum and picking up on another to explain why some have gone more quiet. Instead it's happening on them all I'm visiting, so where is the traffic going to then? Because they ain't going to other admin forums posting their instead from what I see? Another common problem I'm seeing, too many members these days sitting on admin forums logged-in reading but not wanting to post anything hardly.

That's because like AA before when traffic picked up due to the XF controversial topics about the court trial. Same thing again with vB5 topics of that same nature., members are bored with the mundane Admin Niche type topics "how to run a forum", instead it's the controversial type topics that gets people posting and why Howard at TAZ turns a blind eye to them all for the most part, you can't blame him because he knows very well if he didn't then posting their would be much worse.

It's all well and fine taking the stance of not allowing those type of topics on your admin board, dictating "what is allowed". But at what expense... because people will only move to other forums to talk about it their instead. Many might not like those type of negative topics, I know many don't. But hey, those are the topics causing the best discussion.

 

I get a feeling you like the look of IPB4 and wouldn't be surprised to see this forum move to it, if I'm honest.

You seem to like IPB because of the extras it has, and IPB4 might be good and a move in the right direction away from using XenForo which has now frankly become common place used on all admin forums.

 

I do see the point if you did that. XenForo is nice, but IPB does offer a more "full package" to use if that's what you want. It comes with all the extras that are not 3rd party add-ons, they are supported much better. Depends on what you want and know already you seem to prefer that with IPB. Depends what IPB4 is like, if good I can see the sense in moving over to it away from XenForo. As I don't think you'll see those type of extra offcial add-ons for XenForo for a long time to come, if at all if vBulletin 3 was anything to go by when KAM was at vB that never came.

I wish phpBB3 had an official Blog add-on. I'd add it in a heart beat if they did on my forum.

 

Personally, for me admin forums are a source of either

1. providing useful and relevant information or
2. getting useful and relevant information.

Once you get less of both on any admin forum, then that is where it goes down hill. Conversations and opinions or off topic chatter are nice, but once that surpasses the amount of useful and relevant info providing or consuming then that is the warning sign.

It doesn't help that other avenues and sources of information are growing in terms of social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and that massive network of info that is Stackoverflow. Then there's the explosion of self hosted niche expert blogs via Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr etc to compete with for useful and relevant information. All these sources are traditionally by design have much more friendly and useable mobile and tablet form factors than forums in an ever growing mobile user world. Just do a Google search on a admin centric problem, issue or question you may have and there's a whole buffet of info at your finger tips beyond just admin forums these days.

 

Admin forums generally fail to deliver things that admins need, so I find it no wonder that most are deader than disco. I think its a major mistake to approach admin websites as forums. It should be forum + + +
Take tools.digitalpoint.com or marketplace.digitalpoint.com for example. Thats typical stuff admins need.
Its a shame the big boards site is dead and that software comparison tools are available at dedicated websites.
It would be useful to have an overview of all addons available for various software.

 

Shawn at DP is a clever guy though at creating stuff. Most admin forum owners don't have the same kind of coding talent he has to add things like he does for sale to tempt people to join.

 

Developers can be hired, or software can be bought. For example when vbulletin still was the main software it lacked an overview of commercial addons, so I created this site purely because it was useful to me and other admins: www.vb-commercial.com
I will probably close that, because its not useful to me any more.

 

I have to admit... I let AAF die recently because of life's unexpected events. I went into a Master degree program, got promoted to a manager, got addicted to road biking lol and took on way too many web projects!

Admin forums from my observation are owner driven communities, if the owner isn't active, they die fairly quickly. I recently just started getting active again at AAF, and launched a few big contests - now its starting to get like it used to be. I posted over 200 posts today there, haven't done that all year - sadly.

My biggest thing was halting a lot of my online projects so I can focus more on the forums I need to focus on because without me, they seem to die off rather quickly which kind of makes me feel good haha

But I've noticed a lot of admin forums that were really popular are so dead now that the newest posts are from 2013!!! I have always favored this place, and I know AWS for a while now, great forum owner so I know this place will keep going.

TAZ is still around... I was staff there not too long ago but decided to drop out of that to spend more time on my own sites. However with TAZ, the dominate discussion seems to be XF did this, VB did that, fight fight fight... there is only so much of that you can stand to look at before you become annoyed and move on elsewhere...

 

Unfortunately that is the same anywhere nowadays.

Most of the topics on AT usually come from Vbulletin bashing, which I find rather lame and unproductive in a way. Same with Adex.