Is Facebook ruining Forums?

[Alfa1]

Trough the years, I have experienced the opposite of most of the claims you state in the above post.

An UK centric forum can get hundreds of members online at 3 AM.
Unlike vbulletin, Facebook has a brilliant notification systems, and it keeps pulling away members from forum to facebook. Although for a short time, it does keep calling them in and that adds up. This does affect the time members spend on your forum. Maybe you do not notice that with the few users active on your forum, but on a highly active forum its easy to find out.

Just look at the success of XenForo. Asides from their modern UI, their success is on behalf of their (facebook alike) notifications being so addictive. The proof is in the pudding.

I would have agreed with you that people who play farmville for months, are probably not much of an asset to my forum. Well I couldnt have been more wrong. My most active members, and I mean the ones who monthly report hundreds of problematic posts, who post hundreds of important threads, wikis and motivate or members to donate. Those members disappear into the black hole that farmville is. Its apparently addictive. It beats me why, but it happens.

Mark, while I agree that plastering sites with adds, I do hope that yoru site someday will become so successful that you will need more better servers and 5 figure hosting/bandwidth bills will be coming out of your ears. When that success ever happens, please read your above post again.

[MRGTB]

Just a lame excuse coming from Mark really more than anything else. I don't see how he can even claim his forum is UK centric only looking at it, nothing about it shouts that out to me and I'm from the UK. And he know himself that US people are online in their droves when we're all in bed asleep from the UK - Along with many people, yes, from the UK. Just a cop-out excuse that one!

And about the Google Ads! I have a feeling he's been banned from using AdSense in the past most likely, it would not surprise me one bit that one if his domain was not allowed to serve them there. And that's his real gripe when he sees other forums using them that are not banned from the Google AdSense program. Because he wants to use them, but can't on that domain! A little bit of jealousy raising it's ugly head there I feel, so he just likes to keep hyping about other sites using them at his own defence of trying to promote his forum as being ads free.

[Ramsesx]

Just a lame excuse coming from Mark really more than anything else. I don't see how he can even claim his forum is UK centric only looking at it, nothing about it shouts that out to me and I'm from the UK. And he know himself that US people are online in their droves when we're all in bed asleep from the UK. Just a cop-out excuse that one!

And about the Google Ads! I have a feeling he's been banned from using AdSense in the past most likely, it would not surprise me one bit that one. And that's his real gripe when he sees other forums using them that are not banned from the Google AdSense program. Because he wants too use them, but can't! A little bit of jealousy raising it's ugly head there I feel!!!

I missed this squabbling between you and Mark.
But to be fair, your forum can't compare with his forum. I even think 99.9% of all forums in the world are busier and better looking than yours.
The question is, who is the real jealous guy here?

[MRGTB]

Don't kid yourself, seriously! Mark's forum is nothing to be jealous off as far as I'm concerned. Have you read half the stuff posted there, No? Well go spend 5 minutes doing so then come back and give me one single reason why I should be jealous. Let's just say it's not my type of topic he covers there.

2,3,4 word threads started to get as much stuff listed there as he can. Yeah right! I'm envious of that. He may have over a million posts, but that's not hard with threads like: this one and this one (not even one word posted). I hate to sound harsh towards Mark, but you lot do buy into what he does so very, very easily here. All those bla, bla threads he started here about his vB4 forum conversion was nothing more than a publicity stunt to get members for him.

[Ramsesx]

I only read in forums I'm interested in the general topic so I don't care about this.
To come back to the topic.
As some people said I also think facebook can be only dangerous to forums without a clear focus on a subject.
For example, people will always join and visit a vw forum or a iphone forum because facebook has not this environment a good forum has.
I just did a test and searched for iphone on facebook and found one of many groups with discussions.
It looks all real basic and a lot of spam.
But, do you remember the time facebook introduced the "like" button?
I was shocked how fast most websites integrated this button on their sites.
So I think everything can be possible in some years, facebook is beside google one of the most powerful company the web has ever seen.

[DT1014]

The only thing ruining a VB forum is the software itself. While others have moved on, some of us idiots have stuck with VB. BIG mistake. There are other, more innovative solutions that help us compete with facebook and other platforms.

It's time to move on...

[ENF]

The only thing ruining a VB forum is the software itself. While others have moved on, some of us idiots have stuck with VB. BIG mistake. There are other, more innovative solutions that help us compete with facebook and other platforms.

It's time to move on...

I think the mentality of competing with Facebook (with 500m+ users) is a no-win situation. It's best to play their game and attract users from Facebook to your forum. Buying another software package isn't going to magically bring people to your site. You have to give them a reason to do so.

Facebook is almost like a free marketing tool if used properly.

[Mark.B]

Just a lame excuse coming from Mark really more than anything else. I don't see how he can even claim his forum is UK centric only looking at it, nothing about it shouts that out to me and I'm from the UK. And he know himself that US people are online in their droves when we're all in bed asleep from the UK - Along with many people, yes, from the UK. Just a cop-out excuse that one!

Umm, no, 95% of our members come from the UK. We grew out of the support forums of a UK ISP (Tiscali), so that's hardly surprising.

And about the Google Ads! I have a feeling he's been banned from using AdSense in the past most likely, it would not surprise me one bit that one if his domain was not allowed to serve them there. And that's his real gripe when he sees other forums using them that are not banned from the Google AdSense program. Because he wants to use them, but can't on that domain! A little bit of jealousy raising it's ugly head there I feel, so he just likes to keep hyping about other sites using them at his own defence of trying to promote his forum as being ads free.

I'm not even going to dignify that nonsense with a response. We don't carry adverts because we don't want to carry adverts.
Stop being a silly troll, it does you no favours.

[Mark.B]

Don't kid yourself, seriously! Mark's forum is nothing to be jealous off as far as I'm concerned. Have you read half the stuff posted there, No? Well go spend 5 minutes doing so then come back and give me one single reason why I should be jealous. Let's just say it's not my type of topic he covers there.

2,3,4 word threads started to get as much stuff listed there as he can. Yeah right! I'm envious of that. He may have over a million posts, but that's not hard with threads like: this one and this one (not even one word posted). I hate to sound harsh towards Mark, but you lot do buy into what he does so very, very easily here. All those bla, bla threads he started here about his vB4 forum conversion was nothing more than a publicity stunt to get members for him.

You really are a chuckle.

So, because YOU don't like the subject matter, that makes the forum a load of rubbish?

Publicity stunt to get new members? Until Friday I had new registrations turned off for a week. I do not give a single hoot about signing up new members, I've got plenty already thanks. In fact I've just got rid of three for causing trouble for over a year. If people wish to join, we welcome that, but I'm not "actively seeking" members.

The site is a hobby site than, in terms of the scope in which it operates, is hugely successful. I don't want hundreds of people online at a time, because (a) I don't have the staff (and no I don't want to appoint any, t never works) and (b) I'd need a bigger server which I am not prepared to pay for.

The site already costs me nearly £50 a month in server costs alone, I'm not interested in spending any more than that.

Sorry if this doesn't fit with your idea of everyone being "In it for the money".

[Alfa1]

Yawn!

Quite biting the bait Mark.

Can we get back to the original programming? Is facebook ruining forums?

[MRGTB]

Yawn!

Quite biting the bait Mark.

Yeah! I knew he'd take that big juicy fat worm. You just have to know the right bait to give him.

[Mark.B]

[ryan1918]

You can't compete against a company with endless amount of money and billions in free advertising, it's not possible, facebook started out with a small loan, now they are worth more than 50 billion dollars, but that is only as they keep the trend alive, myspace didn't keep up with it and is going down each day, dropped from the top #2 site in the world to number #30, and keeps dropping.

I don't believe social networks are ruining forums, if anything forums are increasing and have been in the past several years, back in 2007 before I closed my site, I ran one of the largest security forums in the world, I just opened it again after being shutdown for all these years and I'm at 3,000 registered members and over 15,000 posts in less than 5 months, I think you can't just create something and expect it to go somewhere, you need to work on it, put lots of time and effort into it, and be willing to devote your life to it, while it grows, and the main thing is you need to create something what no one else has, just because you re-create a forum or 10 forums exactly the same, or similar doesn't mean people will come and use it, it doesn't work like that. It's hard to start forums from ground up, but if you do and you put a lot of work into it, you will get where you want to be, but you can't rush things any faster than they will go.

[Fiskegrej]

No i dont think so, facebook and forums is 2 different things

[Mark Hewitt]

From my experience, yes. I've noticed a significant decline since the rise of facebook. There's still just as much topic related discussion, but people don't log into the forums to catch up with their friends any more.