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by shanmoorthy 1458 days ago
I used to help run a few vbulletin forums, customising the code and doing admin stuff.

One of those that survive, the forum still exists (https://www.sau.com.au/forums/). It's a very specific, niche, technical forum, where owners of Nissan Skylines socialised, asked technical questions and traded.

Facebook Marketplace/eBay etc cannibalised the trading. This meant sponsors of the forum who helped pay the hosting bills slowly reduced.

Social banter moved to Facebook Groups (often more localised geographically... in its heyday in the late 90's and early 2000's the forum had people from all over the world socialising around the clock)

Which means technical Q&A is the main drawcard now, and is the most active component of the forum outside of the diehard "oldschool crew" who keep the social parts active. I expected reddit to cannibalise the technical Q&A, but it hasn't as forums present a combination of threaded conversation and blog style updates from the OP or groups of contributors.
1 comments
Samon 1457 days ago
As an SAU member for almost 20 years, the site is a shadow of its former self. The technical areas tend to be very much a ghost town, with link-rot setting in pretty hard (broken images that were once hosted on imageshack or Photobucket for example really hurt the quality of many of the DIY guides etc). The social areas are mainly a handful of as you say the "old-school crew", but nothing like "back in the day". Other than a handful of motorsport/trackday events each year, the 'club events', especially the 'social' type like cruises and meetups, are almost non-existent. I'm not sure if that's because those events tend to now be organised over social media in smaller circles, or if they just don't happen.

In short, there's just not really much attracting new (or existing, evidently) users to the forum these days. I'd say it's a classic catch-22... people don't frequent the forums so the content (and experience) suffers, and then people don't want to frequent the forums because the content and experience aren't that great any more.

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