How to stay interested in forums?

[Bee]

I honestly don't have a lot of experience with forums. I'd like to try using this place more... I haven't been active in a while, but I started thinking because of the direction Bluesky is going in now.

I imagine part of it is the lack of the Instant Dopamine Hit social media gives you, but also I never really used forums while growing up, so I guess part of me isn't really sure how to get the most out of them.

Anyone more experienced with forums have any advice for a relative forum newbie?

Thanks!!

[Zero Kirby]

Forums are definitely slower-paced than social media or chat servers, especially after the advent of those things - and that's kinda what I like about 'em! Granted, I do remember a time when forums were pretty fast paced...

Anyway, there's a lot less pressure to act fast on something and less of a feeling you might miss something if you're not watching like a hawk. Since everything's organized into topics and posts, it's easy to find a discussion you're interested in and then just add to it, and then to catch up on it later. There's less stigma on posting about something a day or week or two later after the original topic starter or after the last post in the topic. And since it's not a chat room, you aren't pressured to respond to someone instantly either. So you can take a lot more time coming up with a response.

So really, a forum is just something you'd check in on for a little bit a couple times a day, rather than a feed you scroll through and watch like a hawk. Contribute to a couple conversations, read some other topics, then do something else and check in a few hours later. At least, that's how I see it.

[NovaSquirrel]

I've been using the RSS feed that tells me about new threads/topics, and then enabling notifications on threads that seem interesting. There's also a separate feed that has all posts. When something updates infrequently, I have a hard time remembering to continue to check it over a sustained amount of time, but notifications help me treat forum as having more of a supplemental or background role in my socialization.

I would also recommend starting some threads about topics you're interested in, even if you're not sure if there's people who would want to talk about them with you. You might be surprised! This kind of setup is great for getting more niche interests in front of people, and introducing them to something new they didn't know about before.

[Enbyeon]

I'd just like to add, that unlike a lot of forums back in the day, we don't have any rules against "necroposting" aka posting in old threads. That means that people might jump in on a topic days or weeks after the last post.

We also don't have any "reputation" or "like" system, even though there are plug-ins to support it, because we don't want people feeling like they have to post for anything other than just being interested in a topic.

But yeah, how I keep track of the forum is I just have all my social tabs open when I open my browser and just click "Unread Posts" on the menu to see anything I might have missed.

[Eramn Lanif]

If you use bookmarks, you can use the "active topics" list for one. That will give you a quick look at every thread that's been posted in recently.


The other part of it is simply posting. Interacting with the community keeps you engaged, and keeps others engaged with the community, too. Post post post.

[Sugar Meowth]

I've just added this place to my morning routine. Mastodon -> Hello Wordle -> Art sites (DA, Itaku, Weasyl) -> Comics -> RSS feeds -> Here.

I don't feel like it's about "getting the most" out of it. It's like a 5 minute process most of the time to look at any threads where I might be interested in what's been seen. Sometimes there are a lot of posts, sometimes there are none.

This place is slow enough that the unread posts page: search.php?search_id=unreadposts is easier to use than clicking each forum directly. Look at stuff that might not even sound all that interesting! The cost to you of looking at a thread and realizing you have no interest in looking at it again is rarely more than a minute or two.

Or try to create a thread and come up with a way to encourage participation in it! I'm not all that interested in Scrandle, but the daily nature of it and the inevitable "Wait people liked X more than Y?" and "I can't believe Z is even a food you can buy" makes it more than people just copy/pasting some emoji from the site.

I went to the Seattle aquarium the other day with friends and took some photos that I could certainly share in a thread. A "My aquarium visit" thread has a short shelf-life as I post my photos once, and then people say "cool otter" and then have no real reason to return short of marking the thread as read again for the other people that say "cool otter".

What I'd like to do instead (when I remember to get the photos off my phone) is to instead make a "Where did you go lately?" thread. That way others are encouraged to share their own stories and pictures, and can do so repeatedly. Ideally, the thread invites people back as they have new things to see from others and new things to contribute themselves rather than just the replies that are the equivalent of a like/repost on social media.

If you really want to encourage yourself to make this place a regular stop, try finding something that you can share regularly. Back when I was a more avid Something Awful forums poster, the newspaper comics thread was a regular stop as there was always something to goof on every day. And as the threads matured (they're still going after a good 2 decades) there was a shift from just "ha ha this comic is bad and fails to make good jokes" to beginning to appreciate the weirdness of them, the history of comics (a lot of ppl will post comics from like the 1920s) and genuinely learning to appreciate the art form. I no longer read those forums, but I still read a bunch of newspaper comics daily and have gotten folks on a Discord hooked on Mary Worth of all things by just posting it in a thread once per day.

At this forum's size, more generic threads that get regular activity are likely better in the long run than very specific threads. The Fighting Games thread casts a wide net, and by crossing the streams means people can share a cool moment at a Tekken tournament that the Street Fighter players will watch even if they wouldn't go out of their way to see it otherwise. If we had a Tekken thread and an SF6 thread and a 2XKO thread etc. etc. it becomes more of a pain for people to keep up with all of them and they'd all run at a much slower pace.

That's where I'm at at least!

[Eramn Lanif]

I'm of a differing opinion in that sometimes, you want individual threads. Megathreads work, but in the same way that social media does: a thread stops being about a thing and just becomes a place to dump random thoughts (or pictures).

From a different perspective: I might not be interested in random photography, or I might not want to interrupt a thread where everyone's sharing pictures if I don't have my own. But having a thread of "here's somewhere I went lately", as a separate thread, invites discussion. You went to the Seattle aquarium? I did too a year ago, let's talk about it! Or even just discuss the fish there. But in a megathread, I have no way of knowing what's being discussed in it without reading it. Is it an exciting trip report from someone, or just a "cool pictures "?


Part of that is, I think, this:

I went to the Seattle aquarium the other day with friends and took some photos that I could certainly share in a thread. A "My aquarium visit" thread has a short shelf-life as I post my photos once, and then people say "cool otter" and then have no real reason to return short of marking the thread as read again for the other people that say "cool otter".

Does a "shelf life" matter? If I make a big dinner for friends, it won't last the rest of the week, true, but that's fine. It's something you enjoy in the moment, enjoy a few memories of, and then let fall away, ready for the next time.

Megathreads diminish sharing things, too. If your pictures are cool, I can't link your thread to friends. I can't bookmark it, individually. I can bookmark a single post, in my browser, but that doesn't feel very good. And if I want to find that post later, you either have to dig through someone's entire post history, or their post history in the megathread, or ... their list of threads made, which will usually be a lot shorter.



The most important part is to just post, though. You can put them in the proper places later.

[DarkOverord]

The most important part is to just post, though. You can put them in the proper places later.

Honestly this.

Forums of the past were active because they were the OG social media before the modern use of social media. It was just more structured than it is now on Bluesky etc. so it fills the same niche, so I just keep a forum tab open.

As I'm mostly a desktop user I have the forum as a pinned tab alongside my own site, socials etc., I check in and if I have the time I check in on topics and say words

That all said

I'd just like to add, that unlike a lot of forums back in the day, we don't have any rules against "necroposting" aka posting in old threads. That means that people might jump in on a topic days or weeks after the last post.

I'm still trying to unlearn this habit back from 00s forum days

[Zero Kirby]

I'm still trying to unlearn this habit back from 00s forum days

I mean it didn't help that there were a decent amount of forums that would warn or even ban you for doing it

I know I didn't want to lose my Happy Heart Badge from bumping a topic three pages down

[ElTipejoLoco]

You can't accuse anyone of necro-posting

on a forum where one of the co-founders is named Necro

:A

[DarkOverord]

I'm still trying to unlearn this habit back from 00s forum days

I mean it didn't help that there were a decent amount of forums that would warn or even ban you for doing it

I know I didn't want to lose my Happy Heart Badge from bumping a topic three pages down

God genuinely.

You can't accuse anyone of necro-posting

on a forum where one of the co-founders is named Necro

:A

So true tho!

[NovaSquirrel]

I'm still trying to unlearn this habit back from 00s forum days

Meanwhile, the other forum I mainly pay attention to is 20+ years old, and people are totally fine with huge amounts of time between posts, if the new post actually contributes to the discussion. Here's a 17 year bump for instance. So I didn't have that inhibition in the first place hehe.

[Eramn Lanif]

The rule was more important when forums were centered more on frequently making new threads for everything. It used to be that someone would make a new thread for every question or thing they wanted to share, and giant catch-all megathreads were discouraged*.

It was also a little more important when forums were getting hundreds of posts a day. With a lot of active topics, having an old one float up after everyone involved has moved on often just got in the way and could confuse people. Sometimes people in an old thread have become inactive or otherwise left, too.


The move to making megathreads for topics also contributed. Decades ago, you might have new threads for every individual person's questions on, say, HTML. Threads would be active while the OP had new questions to ask, and then naturally die when they were done. A necroposter would come along and then write something useless as a reply to a years-old thread, bumping it back up. Some posts could be on topic, but you'd still see mods go "make a new thread for it".

You still see this on sites like Stack Overflow and Reddit, where after a few months or years, questions and posts are locked and archived. Even if there's still an "on-topic" to be had, cycling in fresh air is important.


* Performance with gigantic threads used to be an issue in the early 2000s, before forums software and server hardware improved.

[DarkOverord]

* Performance with gigantic threads used to be an issue in the early 2000s, before forums software and server hardware improved.

Yeah I remember one forum I was on had a "Talk in Sprite Comics" thread that every few months had to be closed for a new one to be reopened haha