Are admin forums deader than disco?

The question is, is the plight of admin forums a problem we can do something about? If so, what can we do?

Scott

 

While there may have been quite a few of admin forums which have died out, and quite a few low quality admin forums, I will always respect these communities. As a forum administrator myself, these communities have assisted me in learning how to effectively administrate anything I've been a part of. As a place for learning new tactics, I will always make sure to visit these communities, including this one. I don't think admin forums are deader than disco, but I think trying to create another admin forum would be, well... Deader than disco. It's a niche that now has a lot of competition. Everyone will always value the current admin forums, but no one will really jump the gun to join a newer admin forum.

 

LMAO I am not sure if that was directed towards me or not but Members on ANY forum generally don't always want to talk about you specific Niche(be it books/movies in my case or Cars or whatever the niche is) and generally speaking they want topics that are related to sort of whatever which is why many forums(Small, medium and Big boards) tend to have a general discussion area xD

Does not mean that site is poor quality or anything like that. LMFAO too funny to me.

PS- Not every site needs "Debatable subjects" as not every forum is meant to be a debating site where people spend all day going back and forth over the same rehashed topics(example: Vb5) over and over and over again.

 

While I can understand "Educating" customers on the travesty that is VB5(not my opinion, I am just repeating what is perpetuated daily), threads like "Let's watch Vbulletin market share drop" while simultaneously going crazy over xenforo's growth doesn't scream professional or even educating so much as it does Petty.

Furthermore, I don't keep up with @Mark B Bird of Prey or @Paul M however to sit here and say that these gentleman come off as rude and disrespectful is a bit one-sided and it almost makes it seem like people are playing victim. It's one thing, I can see if they were attacking and being snide 24/7 with no provocation and justification but I see BACK AND FORTH bickering between VB5 supporters or whatever and the Anti-VB5 crew. So why aren't the antis yet banned? They usually tend to go in a bit more aggressively to make it known their displeasure of the software and these users.

It begins to look like by banning them, you are almost censoring them in a way. As Birdofprey said, essentially they were banned for "Nothing" more or less and that is essentially what it is. Banning them and censoring them while you "educate" users on Vbulletin.

From a Newbie Admin to someone such as myself who has a few years experience but is still learning daily , that is not educating me on what makes Vbulletin bad. If anything it is showing me just how rabid people who hate a software can get(Let's not forget these same people also praise XF while not fully acknowledging and admitting shortcomings in said software)

It's why I'll never have a Job in customer service lol I can't deal with the attitudes of people and the entitlement they feel that they should be able to speak to me any kind of way while I as a representative have to sit there and take it and not defend myself or my opinions. Which is what is happening here.

 

I do not need or want you to hold my hand. I don't need explaining to me. As I said before, I am well versed in what VB is about and what the company is about. IB is apparently quite hated on the web(much like EIG with web hosting) . I also don't hold people to how they act outside of their jobs(Unless I mean they are truly despicable people, then that is different). How Mark or anyone acts on THIS SITE, shouldn't directly affect my perception of them unless they were treating me badly on my own site.

They should be able to speak freely outside of VB related forums while at the same time letting people know these are their PERSONAL beliefs that don't represent the views of their company.

Again, I don't use Vb so they could very well be assholes on VB sites. I am not defending them by any means. Idk them and never really spoken to them(Mark maybe once or twice).

However, banning then for essentially nothing while not banning the other involved parties(the Anti VB crew) and then placing the blame solely on them for their actions and behaviors does seem a bit one-sided Almost as if people are playing victim in a way.

But eh. I am just an 18 year old admin lol. What do I know? As you said I was 8 when vbulletin was at its greatest, apparently. LMFAO.
But I do know that this is more or less trying to censor them by banning them.

You guys are making your posts WAY TOO personal and not professional and that is where the problem lies.

 

Sorry Sehun but you have not a clue what the admins have to endure with vBulletin come back if you have read every topic at vBulletin.com from 2009 till now then you can imaging what the admins had to endure these years. You also come to the conclusion that people on this forum are the same people that gave many options on how to solve the issues, but vBulletin never did anything with it and instead making it better it kept getting worse. As for making it personal there people here that spend so much money on vBulletin that they lost large sums of money and i am not talking a few hundred but in 4 figures.

As for banning well at some point you do not have a choice do you continue let people disrupt the forum or do you ban them. You can make a topic explaining why they where banned and who they where and in what capacity they worked for at a company. That way you name and shame them including the company and people then know better to watch out for, banning staff or contractors from a site gives more exposure then aloowing it to continue. Here at AT its difficult to ban them because the responses that they provoke gives more post then anything at the moment.

 

The issue is the parties are being banned(vbulletin supporters) while those people who engaged in arguments/drama with them(the Anti-VB crew) were not banned. It looks almost as if AT is essentially censoring them.

 

It's not really censorship, it's just reversing the power dynamic on vBulletin's own sites, where the rude staff get away with everything and anyone who disagrees gets banned.

 

With an extremely high bounce rate indeed. And likely a lower ranking for your main content. I do have an off topic forum, but we once a month or so delete everything thats not somewhat related to the niche. The off topic forum is not visible to search engines, because the content is not rich enough.

I do not dispute that you can have a successful forum with low quality content, but it does depend on your audience. Information oriented audience will be turned away if there is a continuous stream of low quality content. And that is the main point with webmaster forums.
A webmaster forum needs to offer content that is useful to webmasters. If useful content is hidden between 'Do you like pasta?' threads and vbulletin bickering, then its less useful to webmasters.
This opens opportunities to new admin forums.

How many of the regulars here are fully aware whats going on with feature releases by all or even most of the non-xf software?
Migrations from vb are continuously happening, so you would expect that its at least interesting that WLBB is silently advancing at great speed? At the rate this is going they will be far ahead of xf with a similar approach and much richer feature set. CMS, Blog, Wiki, Downloads anyone?

All the admin forums completely missed the brilliant April Fools joke that MyBB pulled with their MyBB 2.0 announcement. (the anti-vb crowd would have appreciated the jest)

IPS regularly posts small updates, but once in a while something really interesting is unveiled which shows the value of IPS4 and often this is completely under the radar of all admin forums. Even though IPS is taking much longer than expected it may well be a game changer for admins. Yet, I do not see enough information on it. I still have to go to invisionpower to check it out.

If Wordpress its forum software BBPress advances more then this will change everything. And its on course for that. In the past years I found only 1 mention of this development on all admin forums. They have just concluded an extensive survey on the most wanted features and design approaches. AFAIK no other software developer does this. Interesting no?

On no admin forum we can read what the new releases of PHPBB3.1, Vanilla 2.1, ModernBB 3.2 offer. Nor did I find any information about the interesting, disruptive & novel concepts of Syndie.

I'll bet that most admins on admin forums have little idea what is going on in the forum software scene.

At least we have pasta threads though...

 

I think you need to chill out. General discussion and on topic discussion are not mutually exclusive things.

Do we need more discussion of non vBulletin/XenForo/IPB scripts? Definitely. Do we need more talk about community management in general? Sure.

But there's nothing wrong with additionally also having pasta threads and forum games. Forums are fun. They're communities. People use them to chill out, make friends, etc. It's not all about bounce rates and seo and ad clicks, it's about having a site people want to use.

So relax. Post about the topics you mentioned, and I'm sure good discussions will be had about those subjects. But the existence of general chat and small talk isn't a bad thing on the internet, as much as a lot of people nowadays seem to think so.

 

I am completely relaxed.
But I do agree with the sentiment that the mass of useless threads is testament to admin forums being deader than disco. Because exactly as you say its about making forums that webmasters want to use. As long as an admin forum is of interest to me, I will visit and participate. However, a stream of useless threads makes it less interesting to do so. At times when the stream of useless threads become too much I tend to stop using AT for some months until it has died down.

 

I agree with your post but Notifications/Alerts have existed on IPS way before IPB4 so they aren't doing Alerts like Xenforo(Which got it from FB) as it has been around since 2010.

 

There are quite a lot of websites running open source software, so there also are many admins who are interested in such.
Excluding those admins does not contribute to the activity of admin forums. Which is the topic at hand.

Yes, I agree. But for the same reason WLBB is also interesting. A CMS is one of the most desired official addons that customers would like to see. Especially since many are coming from vbulletin or IPB. WLBB is already working on this.
WLBB is discussed somewhat but admin forums are not the optimal avenue to stay up to date. And that is my main point: if admin forums owners want to attract more traffic and activity, then it would be useful to make sure such updates are posted.

They post so many mini-updates that its barely interesting. Yet, when something interesting is posted, then its kinda buried within uninteresting updates. I'm not sure why you think someone needs to be at fault.

Frankly, you do not take kindly of many things. It seems to be your nature to go on the offensive when there is no need for such.
I am in no way telling you how to run your community, as you are obviously successful at it.
Your point was that @Terry had no clue about the need for low quality threads because he does not run a large forum. As if you can not run a large forum without low quality threads. I am pointing out that you can. I am not saying that you or anyone else for that matter should.

Nice abstraction.

@AWS I wonder if post exchanges are still active here? I was under the impression that the social threads with really thin content were posted because people get rewarded for posting content. No matter what content.

Is there any chance of getting the ignored forums function back?

 

Boasting about having a big forum posting about "what you ate for tea" or "what book you are reading" doesn't do it for me.. And if you have members who visit your site just to read this shit, you can keep them.

 

One of the things that gets me is a forum that is not only missing an off-topic area, because some people do like to hear the opinions of like minded people about other topics, but when such forums are also missing a forum for feedback about the forum or site itself.

Scott

 

Wrong, I'm using phpBB 3.1 and it's as good as XenForo easy... has Alerts, responsive theme, Spink Search Options their ready to use (if installed), Soft and Hard delete topics (based on usergroup), Social Login (just like XenForo cloned from it), and a lot more... besides.

It's right what he said, people on admin forums are too infatuated with XF, IPB and vB. They are too blinkered to even see what's going on with other forum software improving.

 

Amusing comment of the week.