God, hasn't it been quiet in the forums?

[Pendrive]

Oh well, would the last person to leave please turn out the lights.

[Andrew Lee]

[h3kt0r]

Klaus told that something similar to "Cyberpolygon" will shut down the internet soon...

[webfork]

... please turn out the lights.

I feel like I've said this before but just to reiterate, the site isn't going anywhere, things during the summer get kind of slow, and if you're bothered that it's quiet, then post something. What are you working on? What freeware are you using? There's no commercial or Android programs you wouldn't mind seeing some kind of freeware alternative for?

For my own part, I've been overloaded with a bunch of adjacent efforts but I'm far from done with the site or portable freeware. Even now, I have at least two dozen programs waiting to test out and post about, but I just need to find a free weekend. I've got some amazing markdown, text analysis, and image edition tools that I'm extremely stoked to talk about, assuming they work as advertised.

More to come.

[Midas]

More to come.

[Midas]

People keep saying that forums are waning as online community platforms: do you agree?

As someone who has spent his entire adult life building and refining commercial forum community platforms, the notion that forums are dead continues to surprise me. Some of the world's biggest brands have invested heavily into forum platforms to help reduce support overhead, build relationships with customers and gain valuable first-hand insight into customer needs. I've worked with a good number of them. That is not to say that the internet is not littered with dead forums. It is.

@ https://rosie.land/posts/are-forum-platforms-dead/

[Andrew Lee]

People keep saying that forums are waning as online community platforms: do you agree?

I agree. There is a general migration towards Reddit and Facebook Groups, where it is crazy easy to setup any SIG at the snap of the finger.

As the author has alluded to, I think forums are generally still thriving commercially:

Some of the world's biggest brands have invested heavily into forum platforms to help reduce support overhead, build relationships with customers and gain valuable first-hand insight into customer needs. I've worked with a good number of them.

Forums as a support platform for customers, as well as doubling up as a solutions archival/FAQ module, is still very popular with commercial interests.

[webfork]

People keep saying that forums are waning as online community platforms: do you agree?

I do admit there's definitely something about the "upvote" feature with some sites. You don't have to have some specific opinion about a post or have some kind of long response. I just care that someone saw it and thought it was interesting. That's such a boost sometimes. I've got probably 200+ posts on here over time that don't have any kind of response. That's fine, but sometimes you can talk yourself out of posting something if the last few on the same subject garnered exactly zero response.

That said, I dislike and often hate a LOT of other things about non-forum sites. It usually includes a whole box of things I couldn't possibly care about. News stories, site gimmicks, messages about some forum I visited last month, terrible notifications. I keep coming back to forums because they just get out of your hair.