I have to warn you at the beginning of this post, that I may in fact be going through some sort of a digital midlife crisis. I am not exactly sure how I have ended up here, but over the last few weeks I have found myself missing the “forum age” of the internet. For those who did not cut your teeth in that era, it seemed like every group and community had some sort of forum as their primary internet presence. I am not exactly sure what my first forum was, but I can recall being part of one for every major guild that I was in starting with Everquest. It was often times the core social hub of the group and where all of the plans got made.
The forum that I remember practically living on however was the Argent Dawn US Server forums. So many of the people that I still hang out with to this day came from interactions with this site, and the IRC server that eventually sprung up connected to it. Ynubet my horde side guild leader was a good natured forum troll, and to be honest I probably could have been described in that manner as well. Whatever the case this era is what ultimately lead me to start blogging. I was pretty prolific in posting long winded threads that dissected an issue and tried to sway individuals to my point of view. At some point I realized that effort would probably better spent in a blog post rather than as yet another forum rat.
As new technologies arrived, we tried to adapt that same sort of function to other tools. Slack was the first thing that I can recall trying to make work as a viable forum replacement. For the most part it does, except for the fact that no one actually pays money for their guild slack. That means you are limited to 10,000 comments and as a result you are constantly losing any semblance of history. In my experience this seems to be responsible for the feeling that you are having the same conversation over and over, since there is no consistent thread that you can return to when you want to add fresh thoughts to it.
Discord came along as well, and it has more or less been widely adopted because it is “free” and as a result doesn’t have the issue of constantly losing your history. The challenge with both of these however is there is a sense of immediacy to conversations. Yes you can rattle on about something at length, but it is often times miserable to come in hours or days later and have to perform thread necromancy in order to interject your thoughts into an existing conversation. The organization is also very rough for anything other than random live chat, and the fact that it is so easy to spawn one… means that as I have talked about before we are dealing with a deluge of them available for us to join.
I am as guilty as anyone, in that I kept looking for something better than the forum. I got wrapped up in twitter and google+ and what seems like a myriad of other things all the while not quite understanding what I had lost in the process. There was a specific niche that forums filled, of providing asynchronous communication on topics that could carry out over a number of days rather than a number of minutes or at most hours. During the forum era we used to crave that immediate communication that we have everywhere, but now that we have it… I find myself longing for a slower pace. This is probably just me getting old, but yesterday I followed this madness and created a forum attached to this blog.
It is live and effectively “open for business”. I researched a few options but ended up falling back on the technology that we used to use back in the day for that old school feel. You can reach the forum through a new “Chat” menu, where I have also included the Blaugust and Bel Stream Time discord… even though the later rarely gets used because I don’t really stream much anymore. This might be a horrible idea and it might be the case that no one else feels nostalgic about this era of the internet. The alternative however is one I am willing to take a risk on, that folks miss this sort of interaction and are just needing a place to have it. I spent about two hours last night cobbling this all together, and I am sure there will be changes as we go. However for now I am throwing this project to you my readers to see if you have any interest in it.
I miss forums too, for the exact same reasons all of you stated.
Of course forums still do exist, but many are but a pale shadow of what forums once were.
The ArcheAge forums, for example, seem to pretty much only serve as an outlet for rage and discontent. Of course players letting off steam is nothing new, but the forums of old I remember fondly also had discussions, information, guides, trade, roleplay, everything. The sections dedicated to these things are a wasteland, sadly.
I followed the same path to blogging. I spent an absurd amount of time posting on mmorpg.com forums, and then decided to move into blogging so it wouldn’t all get lost. I still find myself tempted to hang out of forums from whatever games I’m playing, but I often start to compose posts and then delete them when I feel it will suck me into a conversation I don’t have time for. I dislike discord for much the same reasons that you do.
I would shudder to think of how many forum posts I’ve had over the years. Going way back to Wizards of the Coast and the D&D minis crowd at Hordlings, to my local game store, WoW server forums. It’s amazing how everything has changed over the past decade.
The one crucial thing that forums provided (IMO of course) is a way to jump in and easily pick up reading each thread/topic where you left off, in the order that things were written, and then as you read messages they got marked as read. It seems so simple but I don’t think any of these new systems do it ‘right’. Discord seems closest but you don’t get that one page that says “Here’re the threads with new messages, starting with the last message you read last time you were here.”
Plus frankly it is too easy to set up a Discord, so every one and every thing has its own Discord server which makes opening up Discord feel like a huge chore to me. That might just be me, though.
I still prefer forums to the more recent alternatives in the same way I prefer blogs to their stream or video versions. Like you, I spent ridiculous amounts of time posting on forums before I eventually transitioned to blogging but I still post fairly often on forums for several games I play. GW2 has a very lively and well-used forum for a newer game and EQII and EQ players have barely realized the world has changed so their forums are as busy as ever they were.
Discord seems to me to be a lot closer to Twitter than to any kind of Forum. I do find it very disconcerting to see a note telling me that people are actually typing their next comment as I’m still typing my reply to the last one. I find it a bit exhausting, to be honest, which is why I tend to drop out of Discords after a week or two. Forums are much more like reading a magazine that you can pick up and put down and flip back and forth between articles. Much more to my taste.
I ran a forum for when I was in Excite Super Chat, and we used it to when we couldn’t log in to do Vampire the Masquerade Role play ..All text based, sadly though the free forums we used use to delete our account for being “Too graphic” in violence.
I had almost forgotten the various “free forum” providers that had rules like that. I always had hosting options so I would either spin up a PHPNuke originally… or later I settled on SMF which this new forum I created is running on.
I was very active – even ended up as one of the moderators – in a Harry Potter forum (VH, later VH7dragons). I loved this community so much and we actually had sections for everything, playing games together (though within a forum thread, not PC games :p), silly conversations to get away from real life, roleplaying, discussions about politics and religion – I actually did not do any moderating in there and usually avoided that place… having something like this with a few hundred people from all over the world ranging in age from 13 (that was the minimum age one was allowed to sign up, so that’s the minimum age that we had…) up to 60+ this just can’t be a good idea. 😉
Anyway, I actually met several people there with whom I’m still friends today and one of them ended up being my best friend and my best woman at my wedding.
We used the forum with its hundreds of threads for conversations that sometimes spanned over several days. If people got “off topic”, they were encouraged to take it over to a new thread, so the original topic wouldn’t get lost. I loved that and still do! When we wanted a more “real-time” conversation, we moved to AIM, either typing or voice chat. Both options worked really well.
I like Discord that it gives you something similar, but with the way the layout works, you can’t have hundreds of threads. Basically, all you get is sub-forums. But yeah, you can’t go into an active Discord channel and continue with a conversation that you were part of two days ago.