I tried running a forum.... With 24 hours I had 10k posts for Russian porn... And I followed best practices to set it up.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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And I followed best practices to set it up.
Including email confirmation for registering accounts, post limits for new accounts, initially being allowed only to the entry area where one has to post and introduce themselves to be allowed elsewhere?
In my childhood these were the basics.
I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I'm old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.
It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren't many forum software projects).
But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.
1998 | 6686
1999 | 40528
2000 | 70379
2001 | 41129
2002 | 171294
2003 | 203642
2004 | 204685
2005 | 173659
2006 | 150000
2007 | 135936
2008 | 126283
2009 | 94894
2010 | 70333
2011 | 48691
2012 | 31197
2013 | 30606
2014 | 30227
2015 | 29334
2016 | 25472
2017 | 27505
2018 | 28551
2019 | 22366
2020 | 17250
2021 | 12794
2022 | 10135
2023 | 7151
If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.
From your stats, it's clear that the first fall was caused by Facebook and smartphones.
Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.
But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.
Ooooh. Data. Nice.
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Was it any good?
Yeah, was gonna say: it's not just the competition, spams, scams, and trolls are a real issue.
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No it isn’t. Forums are cesspools.
why not implement forums with reddit-like threads?
Because the vote system inherently supports popularity which creates content masking issues and usually results in communities with mods that want to keep that system.
Stack overflow has this exact same issue where stupid crap gets upvoted and useful stuff gets nuked so users don't see things that would otherwise be important or useful.
Lemmy somewhat avoids it due to the relatively low number of posts, but that could easily change.
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I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:
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Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.
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Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .
Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you're much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that's true of any community.
In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.
I don't love it as a "solution", but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.
You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don't be a fucking asshole, or get banned.
You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.
I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.
We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful
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Ideally the world would be moneyless
Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of "realID" type check to verify they're human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.
Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it's reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.
But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn't understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.
Setting aside that PCs don't have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.
Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.
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Lemmy!