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Off topic / Re: Retaining and Gaining Members and Moderation Help
« Last post by MIPS on March 27, 2024, 05:10:05 PM »Much to my annoyance, forums are flaunted as a dying breed. Why talk about things in a public space which others can view when you have more niche (and arguably more likely to disappear) chat groups and boards like Facebook or Discord, the latter having been occasionally advertised as the replacement to forums. The big thing is that neither Facebook or Discord is regularly and automatically archived because external services like the Wayback Machine cannot see beyond the login screen. Forums such as this on the other hand, even after this site closes and shuts down, most of it still remains in the Wayback machine.
I saw somewhat of the same coming from my experience with top-end computer workstations from the 90's. Silicon Graphics Computer Systems had a sizable and knowledgeable community. By the end of the 2000's the community shrank and the moderator pool began to basically be one custodian. Everyone who maintained the hardware had moved on, there was no new contributions to third-party solutions and the equipment itself was pretty much worthless. Eventually the site was too high maintenance to keep running for how little traffic it saw that wasn't spam and shutdown. Silicon Graphics hardware would not ramp up again in value and form a new hobbyist community for nearly a decade later. It's been sustaining itself quite well since then.
Eagles seem to of been at this point for the last decade. They require agonizingly large amounts of regular maintenance, the parts vendors are slowly ending production of some specialty components and because most communities don't yet see 80's station wagons as collectible (you should of seen how the local Corvette community was when my province started offering 30-year Collector's Plates to first gen Dodge Caravans in 2014) there's very little momentum in the community right now.
Thankfully while this site has it's bugs and formatting error's, it's still here.
I saw somewhat of the same coming from my experience with top-end computer workstations from the 90's. Silicon Graphics Computer Systems had a sizable and knowledgeable community. By the end of the 2000's the community shrank and the moderator pool began to basically be one custodian. Everyone who maintained the hardware had moved on, there was no new contributions to third-party solutions and the equipment itself was pretty much worthless. Eventually the site was too high maintenance to keep running for how little traffic it saw that wasn't spam and shutdown. Silicon Graphics hardware would not ramp up again in value and form a new hobbyist community for nearly a decade later. It's been sustaining itself quite well since then.
Eagles seem to of been at this point for the last decade. They require agonizingly large amounts of regular maintenance, the parts vendors are slowly ending production of some specialty components and because most communities don't yet see 80's station wagons as collectible (you should of seen how the local Corvette community was when my province started offering 30-year Collector's Plates to first gen Dodge Caravans in 2014) there's very little momentum in the community right now.
Thankfully while this site has it's bugs and formatting error's, it's still here.