Tomorrow I'm closing my website of almost 20 years which had a super active forum until AI came out a couple years ago. As we've said our goodbyes I had an endless list of 8 - 12 year members reappear, saying, "I didn't say much over the years but I was always reading along." - many of them almost daily.
We were getting thousands of visits every day but maybe 5 posts a day the past two years. Maybe I should have told people to say GM and GN.
Well, that's just how it goes.
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I used to be super active in a couple of very niche forums and over time the engagement just dried up. It is kinda sad but if there’s a demand, people will build new things.
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Yeah, I get why it dried up. Most of it is AI. The forum was super active for 15 years and in the past two years I've lost more than half the traffic, and so did my competitors. I built that traffic over nearly 20 years, and poof, it's mostly gone.
And that's ok. I get it. My business model changed several times over the years and I had to adapt to survive. But too many factors came together at this point to make it interesting to continue, and I was ready for a change a few years ago anyhow.
So no hard feelings, no sadness, just excitement to be free to pursue other things. It was just disappointing to find out that so many people were around for so long but mostly didn't say anything in the forum. They enjoyed reading it and now they're sad I'm closing it down. I wish they would have engaged more when they had the chance. I'll make sure to stay active here on Nostr. I won't forget the lesson.
Is it worth archiving read only?
I pondered what to do for probably three years and couldn't come up with a viable solution.
I thought about keeping it open, read-only, but the community forum was the heart of the website and it would die. The online training program wouldn't function, and I couldn't send driver applications to companies. So, basically, it would become an old blog and forum that would slowly die but had to be maintained.
The other thing I want to do is pass the torch to the next generation. If I kept it open, it would continue to garner traffic and hold others back.
I'm permanently archiving everything, and some long-time members are starting a new forum on Discourse. I'm thinking about trying to do something with the materials, because a lot of it is fantastic stuff, but not sure what to do.
Finally, I'm concerned that I could eventually run into some kind of legal issues. Maybe I missed a tiny technicality somewhere along the way and it comes back to bite me. You never know.
So I just decided the best way to end it would be to save it all permanently, thank everyone, and put it up on the shelf like a trophy, knowing it was a legendary pilar in our industry for a very long time.
I will always think of ways to reuse those materials. I may end up allowing others to use them on their websites if I find someone who seems to have a similar ethos as we had.
I use to run tons of forums back in the day I love em I hope someone builds a forum on nostr that will be easy to create & control sign in w npub & go. I want to learn pidman & put forums like vb3 4 & 5 in images to be easy to setup. Too bad the company bellied up last year & vb is now abandoned ware. Now you have to rely on nulling activation.
