Honestly, forums in general (with the exception of specific tech focussed ones) are pretty much dead everywhere. I remember this was the first Aus band forum, and one of the first (might have even been the second one) on UM, and was actually around as its own standalone thing for a year or two before we hopped on to UM. My user number is 7. That's a long fucking way back! By 2006 this place needed a team of mods to keep it in check. But all things pass. I've actually been debating shuttering it, honestly. When you go from like 20 posts in a day to 2 posts in a month at best... yeah, I think you need to take a bit of a look at stuff.
Yeah ive noticed the only forums that are surviving are the hobbyist etc type ones like musicians,video games etc
Perhaps there'll be a forum resurgence someday? It's still my preferred platform. Facebook is too temporary. I like being able to keep popular threads going.
That's pretty much the only thing keeping it alive at the moment. When I get a bit of a chance, I'll see if I can archive certain posts or threads just as a backup.
Its funny because all Facebook has become is a giant shitty forum, with people posting on Topic pages more than to their friends ie News pages
@Lord Tim I guess you could make a band post encouraging fans to get back into the forum. The General Metal Discussion and GMD Social sections on UM are an attraction as they still have some activity. I've enjoyed branching out to those sections and participating in the music & movie poll threads and whatnot. The tricky thing with forums seems to be that most people rarely start threads. If more of us thought up suitable threads to start, maybe it wouldn't look as inactive.
I think Reddit (or other sites like it) is another big competitor to forums. It really is similar in nature - e.g. you could go to www.reddit.com/r/metal to talk about metal. I agree they don't have the topic longevity that forums do, though. I guess a good example is I ended up on r/AliceCooper recently - I didn't even think to look for an online forum. That sub-reddit has about as much activity as this forum though, so the grass isn't always greener.
I fucking hate Reddit because of things like no topic longevity as you say. There's a huge disparity between comments that get seen by everyone and comments that nobody reads. If you comment on a post 12 hours after it was posted, either your comment is buried despite other comment threads on the post being active, or just nobody clicks that post because it's too old. On posts with little activity, sometimes even being the 2nd person to comment means you're too late to get any kind of reaction or response and your effort feels wasted. I keep commenting there very occasionally but for the most part it's a very disappointing experience, even compared to Facebook.
We would regularly do that a couple of years back, posting content here first and trying to get people to engage and... well, it was pretty much all of you guys that did it, with a rare "oh yeah, this place is still here" post and then nothing. Question for all here - do we all have Facebook logins, even if you hate going there? A couple of ideas come to mind. Facebook Groups is one good place where things don't tend to disappear off too much unless the group is crazy busy, which I doubt ours would get. And you can sticky certain posts too I believe. Alternatively, I'm wondering if I can do something a little scaled down and more bespoke on the LORD site itself that's linked to your Facebook login, so you have the best of both worlds. You don't need to sign up for anything new, you get notifications to a service you're already subscribed to, and it's easy to stay in touch with other members too. We already have Facebook comments as the default on any blog posts rather than the built-in Wordpress ones, so I'm wondering if something could be build around a custom blog type where we can all reply that way. Not sure there's an elegant way to do that though. Facebook Groups sounds like the easiest solution.
I use facebook groups a decent amount - it's the main reason I go on there really. It's particularly good for special interest stuff, like genealogy in specific regions. Whatever the platform, the main thing for me is a reasonable amount of traffic to make it worth checking regularly, combined with some element of longevity.
I actually quite like Facebook, just not as much as forums. I use the 'Most Recent' news feed feature on desktop and try to scroll through all posts back to where I was last up to. So I mainly use it to see everything friends are posting and find out about gigs. I'm in about 10 active groups, some just for posting silly shit, but I probably wouldn't join any more.
It's crazy how easy it is to share music now... Their new album: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nhSr21JtED8Hr9_Zvz9dNo3z1qDlUbduY I guess if you like it, go and buy it?
Seems the pandemic has killed this section of the forum just that little bit more. Hopefully the tours thread revives when the tours do!
I think we were much more active initially, when we first went into lockdown. I was going to suggest that perhaps we could share some albums worth listening to on youtube music the other day, but thought that you guys might be getting sick of me bringing up YTM so often I've been listening to this one a few times recently. I didn't know of this band before YTM suggested it to me. Firewind's self titled album: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nIc4V5hzaiYlHyc7R5qlK5xXABgsyx41Y
