The future of programming forums

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Hello Java Ranch people!

My name is Dani and I run a different programming forum called DaniWeb that has been around since 2002 and used to be pretty darn popular. I've been dealing with some really challenging health issues the past few years, and, combined with the industry landscape (e.g. Stack Overflow and how much or not so much Google tends to rank forums), my site has really been struggling a lot lately.

I know a lot of other programming forums (Dream.in.Code, DevShed, etc.) have all died over the years, and Bytes.com seems to be overrun with spam lately. In my research trying to figure out what people are looking for in a programming forum these days (let's face it: I'm stuck in the past!), I keep finding a lot of blogs and such recommending Coderanch. Sooooo ... I thought I'd come on here and see what you guys have going on, and I was saddened to see a bunch of posts here also suggesting that this community is also on the decline.

Perhaps we can put our heads together to figure out what we can do to compete against all of the distractions of the modern web? For those of you who find yourself still coming here, day after day, what keeps you here? What do you like about this site that you can't get elsewhere? (On DaniWeb, it tends to be the nostalgia factor more than anything else, I'm afraid!) I'd love to get a dialogue going about the future of programming forums despite alternatives such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, etc.

[Tim Holloway]

Welcome to the Ranch, Dani!

Yes, traffic has declined over the years, but we're far from dead. I do think that certain industry trends have resulted in fewer people asking questions than formerly - reduced staffing and AI being likely candidates.

Our claim to fame is our "Be Nice" policy. You won't get flamed here. Flamers aren't welcome. And even if 147 people have already asked the same question, we'll be just as helpful and polite as we were to the previous 147.

Beyond that, we promote deep understanding. We don't give quick solutions or copy/paste answers, we attempt to explain why and what as well as how.

[Randy Tong]

I'm curious how do programming forums usually earn revenue? And what motivated you all to build one?

[Randy Tong]

For those of you who find yourself still coming here, day after day, what keeps you here?

For me, it’s the fact that this forum always promotes new books, and we even have opportunities to participate and earn books. It’s a great way to stay updated and get valuable resources.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Hi Tim! Nice to be here

Glad to hear that you guys are far from dead! DaniWeb is definitely dead, but I became bedbound in 2020, 2021, and again for all of 2023, and was ultimately diagnosed with terminal cancer, among a host of other chronic conditions that have made it impossible for me to continue working on DaniWeb on a regular basis. That was really the nail in the coffin for us. With everything I have going on health-related, I haven't really kept up with what other programming forums are like nowadays, other than seeing Dream.in.Code go offline due to lack of funds/traffic.

I think where AI fails is in being able to effectively debug logic errors in someone's code, or make suggestions for novel ways of doing things. (AI is pretty derivative, after all.)

Randy,

I can't speak for Code Ranch, but DaniWeb has always earned revenue from advertising as well as selling premium memberships. (https://www.daniweb.com/donate/index)

As far as what motivated me to build DaniWeb, back in 2002 I was the only tutor in my university's computer science department, but then as I started taking more advanced courses, I had no one who was there to help me. A friend of mine was really into a particular Anime forum at the time, and he encouraged me to start a forum for computer science students to get help from each other.

What put us on the map is that we were the first tech site back then to put everything under one roof ... meaning that as technologies began being used together more and more, people who were experts in one subject and had developed klout in our community could explore other technologies without feeling like a complete n00b, because their existing experience and klout followed them around our different sub-communities. Before us, there was maybe Java Ranch for only java help, JustLinux for just linux help, etc.

We don't have much of a differentiator nowadays, at least in the forums, which I think is a big part of the problem. I try my best to enforce a similar be nice policy, but we have a handful of top members who aren't necessarily outright flamers, but they can come across as rude/unpleasant to members who just ask blatant homework questions without showing any effort (demanding copy/paste answers), who they feel are clearly just posting in the forums to spam their signature, etc. When I try to get on them for not being nice, their response is that the people asking the questions are the ones who aren't caring or being nice, and they should be called out for it. Then my response to that is that when other nice members are lurking in the forums, the gruff responses are a turn-off to those nice people turning from lurkers into posters, because they themselves are given a reason to be afraid they're going to get blasted as well. It's a whole thing.

We do have a patented matching algorithm to match question askers with answerers, as well as this "Tinder for business" model that connects members for 1-on-1 chat, and a pretty sophisticated API, but that's a whole other story.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Oh ... another thought: Out of curiosity, what platform powers this site? DaniWeb is custom coded. I'm just wondering if this site is as well?

[Tim Holloway]

Sorry to hear about your health. I've been providing support someone with cancer for about a year now. Hope we got it licked. Lost a friend some years back to a brain tumor that took him from active to dead in about 2 weeks.

I am cynical about AI myself. AI confidently gives wrong answers and is prone to becoming quite bigoted. But it's the Big Thing and corporations will do almost anything except hire enough people at a fair wage and treat them well, so AI - and covering up for AI - is where it's at right now.

The Ranch runs on a proprietary program called jforum. It's written in Java (naturally!) and is hosted by a Tomcat server. The permies.com website is also a jforum application.

Our solution to flamers has been to kick them off the Ranch. The moderators are a fairly large group and periodically we review possible additions based on how active users are and how they interact with other users. We're more interested in how helpful they are than in their technical credentials. We've a large enough user base that someone is almost always able to help with the technical parts, moderator or not.  The knee-biters usually are gone in a week or less. The curable ones get admonished, and as long as they behave, are treated the same as anyone else.

[Norm Radder]

I am also wondering what is happening.  I have been a moderator on the defunct forums: Java Forums, Dream In Code and DaniWeb. I am currently the last moderator on Java Programming Forums and still occasionally visit Code Guru (member since 1999) and DevShed.  I visit JPF several times a day and mostly just purge spam.  About once every week or so there will be a question.  There used to be at least one a day.  I don't know why the owner pays for the site.  It has ads for non-moderators that I never see.

I enjoy CodeRanch.  I rarely get to post as I recognize I am so far out of date.  But I do enjoy seeing the code that Piet, Carey, Campbell or Tim post.

I was a systems programmer for the IBM VM OS.  All coding in assembler.  I took a 9 year trip and when I came back and looked at the job market, I realized I was a dinosaur. I wanted to do some programming projects on a PC, found Java and have followed it along ever since.  Still very much a dinosaur but loving it.  I probably write two or three utility programs a month.  Sorry to wander off, but I have O.L.D.

Norm

[Dani Wolkowicki]

I just looked it up and it looks like JForum is an open source Java port of phpBB 2. DaniWeb actually used to use phpBB 2 back in the early 2000s. (Then we switched to vBulletin and then to our own proprietary platform that I wrote myself.)

We used to have a very, very friendly group of moderators, but unfortunately, with our demise, the ones who are left have turned cynical and cranky since 99% of the content being posted nowadays is pure spam. We're pretty much in the same boat as JPF ... mostly mods are deleting spam, every so often there will be a question, I pay for the site entirely out of pocket. Same story.

In my case, I do it because DaniWeb was very profitable for 20 of the past 25 years. Then I got sick. Getting rid of DaniWeb feels like getting rid of the last bit of me that feels healthy and useful and productive. DaniWeb currently gives me the only thing I have that makes me still feel like me. How much longer I can keep it going is debatable, but at least in the meantime, I'm posting in forums such as this one to see if I could learn from other communities what I could do to revitalize it.

I am also wondering what is happening.  I have been a moderator on the defunct forums: Java Forums, Dream In Code and DaniWeb. I am currently the last moderator on Java Programming Forums and still occasionally visit Code Guru (member since 1999) and DevShed.

I think you have that backwards. DevShed is also now fully defunct. (Do you mean to say that you occasionally visit DaniWeb?) I used to chat on the phone with Chris, the founder of Dream.In.Code, all the time back in the early 2000s. I remember hanging out in Jim Boykin's basement right after he purchased DevShed. Both are now gone. I saw Jim last year and asked if he still had a copy of the database he could give me access to, but sadly he said he didn't have a copy anymore.

As far as you being a dinosaur, that holds true for the last of the DaniWeb holdouts as well. The ones who are left tend to be so because they're retired and so they can be less discretionary with their time, so to speak. The problem with that is that means that we don't have many members nowadays with the skillset to answer the odd question that comes along. That makes it hard to retain newer members. It's a vicious cycle.

[Norm Radder]

members nowadays with the skillset to answer the odd question that comes along.  

Right.  When that happens I send them over to CodeRanch.  Beginning programmers seem to have the same types of questions which I can usually handle.  The tough questions for me are about the peripherals like Maven or Gradle or Spring or Tomcat or Eclipse which I have don't use.  

occasionally visit DaniWeb

Once or twice a year.  I lost my old userid and had to create a new one but I was able to find my old posts - about 7K.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

I lost my old userid and had to create a new one but I was able to find my old posts - about 7K.

This you? https://www.daniweb.com/members/768082/normr1

[Norm Radder]

Yep, that was my contribution to your site.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Wow, that's some contribution over only 2-3 years! I really, really appreciate it. Reach out to me privately by shooting me an email (https://www.daniweb.com/welcome/contact) and I'll see if I can get you logged back into that account, if that's something you're interested in.

I would love to get some insight into what made you stop posting, if you don't mind me asking, as well? (Just curious to know what we can do to improve!) It looks like you stopped in the peak of our popularity, but you're obviously still active on other forums such as this one. I think the motivation of forum members is always so intriguing!

[Tim Holloway]

phpBB sounds familiar. But the Ranch software is constantly being enhanced so it would probably be pretty hard to find any resemblance at the detail level anymore.

Norm and I have similar backgrounds, actually, although I left the mainframe world back in the 80's, did a stint developing Macintosh software, launched a C++ development system (sold under the Lattice/SAS label), did work on a custom laser printer device driver for Windows, went back to the Enterprise world (ugh, OS/2!), saw it degenerate into a "perma-temping" environment, so I went gig-based, saw my major customer fade, so I started doing Internet of Things stuff where I not only coded firmware, but did electronics design. Haven't seen any projects lately worth bidding on, so that more or less has me retired, but I run an in-house enterprise-grade server farm originally setup for R&D and internal business support and have been trying to do some work on an Android project.

So I don't have active Java work, but I try and keep up on general developments. And learn a lot from Ranch discussions.

[Tim Cooke]

Hi Dani, nice to see you and thanks for dropping in on us. I am also very sorry to hear about your health issues, the human body health lottery can be a real shit sometimes. (excuse my language)

Personally the "Be Nice." policy pretty much does it for me. There is a zero emotional barrier to entry when asking questions at CodeRanch, I know that whatever I ask it will be met with civility and it will be welcomed by everybody. That is in contrast to the likes of the StackOverflow collection where you are likely to be met with hostility because you haven't asked your question in quite the right way or, god forbid, you ask a question that has been asked before. That appears to be a cardinal sin. For these reasons I have never contributed anything to SO.

I'd say there are a few things going on here that maintain its usefulness.

For many years we have run book promotions where authors come to the forums to answer questions about their books, then a handful of question askers win a copy of the book, or software system, or whatever it is. This relationship with publishers brings people to the Ranch as the publishers promote these activities through their own networks, which can be quite large particularly for the likes of Manning, O'Reilly, and Pragmatic.

We have many authors of books on the staff here. For example: Bear Bibeault (Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja), Jeanne Boyarsky & Scott Selikoff (many Oracle certified study guides), and a bunch more over the years. Jeanne and Scott use this forum for their errata submissions. Bert Bates has long used the staff pool here for technical reviewing his certification guide books too.

Even one of the core maintainers of jForum, Ulf Dittmer, was a very active and long serving staff member up until a few years ago.

I guess we have a good mix of people from across the World all at different stages of their lives and career. I would say I'm in the middle of my career with about 20 years behind me and probably another 20 ahead of me. I like forums over Q&A sites because with a Q&A site you get the answer to your question but nobody challenges you to reflect on whether you have asked the right question. Forums do that, we see value in truly understanding the motivation behind the question and as a result the answer that follows is often higher quality.

Lastly, but certainly not least, it would be remiss of me not to call out Paul Wheaton, who carries the Trailboss title and is the owner of CodeRanch. Paul has been running this forum since the 90s and has been the primary driving force behind pretty much everything that has happened to the forum over that time. The long success of CodeRanch is a testament to his vision of what CodeRanch is and isn't.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Tim Cooke wrote:. . . We have many authors of books on the staff here. . . .

Also, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, though we rarely see them nowadays. Kathy was instrumental in founding this site in the first place.
They're not on the staff, but we see Barry Burd and Cay Horstmann occasionally.

[Mike Simmons]

I believe Kathy and Burt (especially Kathy) were responsible for the original JavaRanch site, the name, look and feel, and perhaps most importantly, the original tutorials, which were a big draw back in the day. But it had no forums originally - those came from Paul, when he took over the site from Kathy.  So as far as the forum is concerned, it's pretty much Paul who originated it.  I believe the original software was UBB, which used Perl.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Norm Radder sent me a private message purple mooseage with the reason why he left DaniWeb back at the height of our popularity, and he generously said it would be okay if I shared it here:

Your post covered most of the reasons I had for leaving.  Specifically I remember this:
An OP posted a programming question
I researched the topic, wrote code to solve it and made notes on the steps I had to take
Another OP posted complete code without any description or comments about how the code worked.  Just code ready to copy.
I deleted the posted code and asked its poster to take the time to explain the how and why of the code.
A super moderator, restored the deleted code and said something to its poster.
At that point I felt I was wasting my time trying to help students learn how to program.
Norm

I thought this was interesting because it highlights the way that I've always struggled with a be nice policy. While I agree with Norm's sentiment that we should always be encouraging members to not just ask for quick answers, and, similarly, not to provide quick answers to those who ask, I'm stuck how to do so in a way that highlights an always be nice policy all the way around. DaniWeb's policy has always been that moderators will never provide quick copy/paste answers, and are free to discourage others from doing so, but that no moderator action (e.g. deleting posts, infracting/banning members, etc.) should ever be enacted upon posts/members that do provide quick answers. For example, how can we have an always be nice policy that demonstrates to everyone that they will never be hit hard with a bat for taking the time to help someone with a question, including writing and providing detailed code, only to find that their post is deleted and all the time they spent "helping" erased. I feel like that's a slap in the face to that member who spent time, tried to help, and, quite frankly, is most likely an expert in their field, yet now put off from ever helping anyone on DaniWeb again.

The other thing I noticed is that Norm quietly left DaniWeb, never posting a public goodbye nor messaging me privately. I really wish that he had taken the time to post in our private Moderators' Place forum what had upset him so that the mod team could discuss it and come up with a resolution. I feel like it was a failure on my part for not making the community welcoming enough for him to feel comfortable being able to air his grievance (which obviously was important enough to him for him to leave DaniWeb despite being a moderator with over 7K posts). So, from my perspective, it just highlights the struggle we've always had with being nice to all and never letting any member feel unwelcome when they had good intentions. I have always very firmly felt like posts should always only be deleted if they were made with bad intentions. Members should never be made to feel unwelcome or attacked or have their posts deleted (especially if they took a long time to compose said posts) if their intentions were good. Does Code Ranch have a very different policy with regards to that?

This leads me to something else I wanted to bring up. I noticed that quite a few of you have joined DaniWeb yesterday/today and I so very much appreciate that!! Thank you so much. However, something else I've noticed is that every single one of you also posted an introductory post that got flagged by our spam bot, and then ended up changing up your post to get it through our system.

As I've mentioned before, we get a lot of blatant spam posts every day and very few real posts. We had to employ a spam filter because otherwise moderators would be manually deleting between 10 and 100 spam posts every day. When I first saw that you guys got tripped up by our bot, I thought to myself what a horrible first impression that is. However, what I find interesting is that every single one of you guys got caught up by our spam bot, and yet not a single other false positive has got tripped up by our bot over the past many, many months. (We typically get about one false positive every 4-5 months. There were 4 today alone! All from you guys!).

However, since you guys did trip it, I might as well ask: Did that create a really bad first taste in your mouth? Is there something that we could be doing better? (BTW, the spam bot is not flagging on any link that gets posted. You guys all just somehow matched the same heuristics that our breed of spammers typically do.)

[Dani Wolkowicki]

For what it's worth, I agree with Sanjay's (our old super moderator) approach. The member who posted the quick copy/paste code to answer the student's homework question was appropriately sent a private message saying that we discourage doing that because it doesn't actually help the student, and to please not do it moving forward. However, the post they already contributed, and took the time to write, shouldn't have been deleted with them receiving an infraction (which leads to a ban) because it was posted with good intentions.

[Tim Cooke]

We certainly are not immune to the kinds of frustrations that Norm cites as his reason for stepping back from DaniWeb staff. Forum moderation can be tricky sometimes and nothing ever goes absolutely perfectly, but you do your best. While our overarching policy is "Be Nice.", we have a bunch of other guidelines on our Wiki that help the staff be consistent in how we respond to stuff How To Answer Questions On CodeRanch.

Having my first post on DaniWeb get caught in the spam trap was a little frustrating but at the same time I completely get it. My post consisted of a brief introduction and a link to coderanch, which I accept probably looks very similar to a spam post. Some text and an external link to whatever it is they're trying to boost the SSO for with backlinks. I'm sure it's possible to automatically detect the difference between those two intents, but I don't know how to do it. Something something with AI something, I would expect. Or perhaps allow all first posts but put them on an approval list for staff to approve or kick for spam? I suspect that would involve development of your forum software, if you're up for such things.

You mention that you have done pretty much all of the DaniWeb forum development yourself over the last 25 years. Do you allow other staff to contribute to forum development? We encourage any staff member to make contributions to the forum codebase if they want to. I've done a few teeny bits and bobs a long time ago but I know that should I have the time and inclination again I could jump back in, and I find that very cool indeed.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Our spam bot is pretty sophisticated in that we do quite a long handful of heuristics checks, including checking for copy/pasted AI-generated content (that's been a big thing lately on DaniWeb; Something about wanting the easy way out looking like an expert when you're not). Specifically, your post got tripped because the link had long keyword-rich anchor text, which tends to be a bit of a red flag in terms of scouting out SEO spammers. Most people just post a naked link and leave it at that, or might leave the default "Click Here" anchor that shows up when you click the link button in the toolbar. The other thing is the link pointed to https://coderanch.com/forums which is seen by our spam bot as a landing page. (Again, spammers typically link to marketing and/or landing pages.) On average, the links posted by our members tend to be to specific technical articles, documentation, etc. as opposed to landing pages. And then, of course, it was your first post. Those are the things that strike me at first glance when I look at the message that you posted that got caught up by our spam filter. The actual filter flags on link spam, image spam, AI generated content, posts including business contact information, word vomit (nonsensical posts), and so on and so forth. I tweak it every few months by training it on the posts that get through the cracks that moderators then manually delete. When running our filter over all of our existing (non-deleted) content, the false positive rate is less than 2% across all posts going back 20 years, of which the majority are likely posts that fell through the cracks and should probably be deleted, which is why I'm astounded that every single one of you got tripped up by it.

I've attached a screenshot of the moderator side of things. You can look at the first post attempt that was flagged on that page there and see that I can click on the "Not Spam" button and immediately publish the post. You can also see that, coincidentally, that particular post attempt doesn't include any links. The spam bot was still able to catch on that it's spam. It would be a very simple tweak to change it from flag now, ask questions later into give the benefit of the doubt now, flag later. However, I would have to say we most likely don't have the moderator power to it the other way and not have all of those spammy posts be live on the site for 12-24 hours. Especially with my health the way it's been. It would also be extra work for the moderation team without a lot of upside given how few false positives we get.

In 2002, DaniWeb started on phpBB, which as I mentioned earlier, it seems was the inspiration for JForum. I modded the heck out of it and became well-known in the phpBB community. In 2006, we switched to vBulletin, and I became well-known in the vB community as well, over the years. In 2012 or so, vBulletin was sold and I didn't like the direction the new owners were taking it. We then switched to a proprietary platform that was 95% written by me, and 5% written by one of our moderators at the time. That was the first piece of software I had ever written, soup to nuts, completely from scratch. In 2015, after learning a lot, I rolled my own framework and ORM, rewrote the entire thing, and that's the platform that DaniWeb still sits on today.

I would consider myself a very active developer. Of course, my health gets in the way quite a bit lately, but I would say that I touch the code base at least every other day. DaniWeb's code is a private repository over on Github (with a contributor of 1), and you can see here how active I am. (All of my contributions are for DaniWeb's code, so over 1000 commits/year on average, with the exception of the past couple of years that I've been very sick where I'm down to 300-500 commits/year.) Of course "commits" doesn't translate to how much time is spent there, or how big or small the changes are, but it gives you a ballpark idea of how much active development DaniWeb's infrastructure gets.

You say that Code Ranch encourages any staff member to make contributions to the code base. How do you manage that? Is there one person who decides which pull requests get approved? What if someone codes a feature that ends up being rejected? Do they now feel resentment for wasting their time? It sounds very messy to me, but perhaps that's been because I've been a lone wolf for my entire career!

Oh, yes, you've all spoke to your careers in the industry. I've been a self-taught programmer since a very, very young age, and a computer geek my entire life. I was pursuing a computer science degree when I founded DaniWeb. I went into it full-time when I graduated, selling advertising for a living, and that's all I've ever done or known. In 2016, I moved from my hometown in New York to Silicon Valley, where I met my now-husband who is an engineering manager at Apple, Inc.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

We don't have much of a differentiator nowadays, at least in the forums, which I think is a big part of the problem. I try my best to enforce a similar be nice policy, but we have a handful of top members who aren't necessarily outright flamers, but they can come across as rude/unpleasant to members who just ask blatant homework questions without showing any effort (demanding copy/paste answers), who they feel are clearly just posting in the forums to spam their signature, etc. When I try to get on them for not being nice, their response is that the people asking the questions are the ones who aren't caring or being nice, and they should be called out for it. Then my response to that is that when other nice members are lurking in the forums, the gruff responses are a turn-off to those nice people turning from lurkers into posters, because they themselves are given a reason to be afraid they're going to get blasted as well. It's a whole thing.

So Norm, I just have to ask. Are you nice and pleasant to the people asking for and providing copy/paste code answers here at the ranch?

[Campbell Ritchie]

Yes, we are. We politely tell them that they can't have copy'n'paste code

[Tim Cooke]

Hello again Dani,

I've spent a few weeks hanging out at DaniWeb (as well as here, of course) and can certainly see where you concerns come from about its future. Some things I've observed are:

You get a lot of spam. Assuming your spam filter is as good as you say and catches most of it there is still a bunch every day that gets through. I have been using the Latest Posts view and most of the time it's just junk posts which makes it hard to filter out any proper posts I could actually help with.

You get a lot of posts about SEO and I expect they're quite hard to moderate. Because you yourself are a bit of an SEO expert it is perfectly reasonable that people will ask genuine SEO related questions at Daniweb, but because of that it's hard to distinguish the legit questions and the SEO "questions" for the purposes of achieving SEO. It's a lot easier for us here as we generally don't discuss SEO so any SEO topics are almost always spam and get canned

You have somehow attracted a niche spam topic of Router administration tools. I only mention it because we don't really get any of that, and it's interesting that you do and we don't

You had a bit of a public ding dong with one of your moderators about a response to a topic. I'd definitely recommend confining that kind of discussion to your private staff channels as it puts people off. For example, we never suggest that anybody at CodeRanch is anything less than perfect

There is little in the way of repeat engagement. In the few topics that I did make an effort to respond to, they just withered and died. I don't know if the author of the question read the response but they certainly never came back to say whether they solved their problem or not. That's a real shame as the folks who want to help out also want to know if they actually did help out.

I appreciate this doesn't really help much, but just thought I'd share my experience.

The main competitor of the forum is now AI chat tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, etc etc. I read recently that even StackOverflow participation has pretty much stopped now too. I still think there's huge value in the discussion forum. AI tools will answer your question with absolute confidence and authority regardless of whether it's right or wrong, and regardless of whether you asked the right question. Whereas on a forum you're asking real people with real brains who can really get to the bottom of what it is somebody is trying to achieve, and the outcome isn't always an answer to the original question. Often times we question the question and take the discussion in a different, and often better, direction.

So, how do we convince the World that discussion forums, full of real humans with real smart human brains, are and have always been the best way to get help with your software engineering challenges?

I don't know. Maybe you do.

(with all this SEO talk I fully expect this thread to become a spammer honey pot before too long)

[Dani Wolkowicki]

I'd definitely recommend confining that kind of discussion to your private staff channels as it puts people off.

I wholeheartedly thank you for checking out DaniWeb and agree with everything that you've written. With regards to this point, specifically, I don't know what else to do. If you're referring to the case I think you are, I felt like I did my best shutting it down by locking the topic and insisting that we don't derail the conversation any further. There have been other instances where something similar has happened. We of course have a forum for moderators and a second forum only for seasoned community members. If this was 10 years ago, we would have had a staff hierarchy including our community admin who kept members happy, our lead moderator who kept all the other moderators heavily in check, moderators for specific forums so that a C++ moderator, for example, would have no business having to decipher or decide anything within the SEO forums, etc. Today, we don't have any of that, and after years of being bed-bound dealing with my health issues, I'm at a loss how to start over, or even if it's possible.

There is little in the way of repeat engagement. In the few topics that I did make an effort to respond to, they just withered and died. I don't know if the author of the question read the response but they certainly never came back to say whether they solved their problem or not. That's a real shame as the folks who want to help out also want to know if they actually did help out.

In 2016, I made a disastrous business mistake that caused the majority of members to unsubscribe from receiving email from us. Around the same time, in an effort to improve security, we switched login platforms and that caused all users to have to reset their passwords. (Note: most just didn't bother logging back in) Then in 2020, I was bed-bound and having really bad brain fog, and a logic bug in my code caused all of our email to start going to spam. Those two things really are what destroyed us. Both my fault. Both avoidable. I'm sure we would still be thriving (or at least surviving) if it weren't for those two huge business mistakes.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Tim Cooke wrote:The main competitor of the forum is now AI chat tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, etc etc. I read recently that even StackOverflow participation has pretty much stopped now too. I still think there's huge value in the discussion forum. AI tools will answer your question with absolute confidence and authority regardless of whether it's right or wrong, and regardless of whether you asked the right question. Whereas on a forum you're asking real people with real brains who can really get to the bottom of what it is somebody is trying to achieve, and the outcome isn't always an answer to the original question. Often times we question the question and take the discussion in a different, and often better, direction.

For many years, Stack Overflow ruled the Google search results because that platform is all about objective responses, and Google is all about giving their searchers the quickest way to a definitive answer to their queries. In order for Google to accomplish their goal, it made more sense to send their searchers to objective Q&A sites than to a long-winded discussion that they need to wade through. However, now with AI, ignoring the problems of hallucinations, etc., an AI response right at the top of the search results is a more effective way of Google accomplishing that goal than sending users to any third party site, be it Stack Overflow or otherwise. AI is certainly the beginning of the end of Stack Overflow IMHO. AI, however, cannot replace human discussion, and so I feel as if it is less of a threat to programming discussion forums. I also think that Google realizes this, albeit slowly. Around 2023ish, they were really all about recognizing the value of community and online interactions, and began sending traffic to Reddit, but even that has died down now, although I'm not so sure that AI has been able to replace the tone and multiple perspectives that searchers got from reading responses on Reddit. I think Google still has a ways more to go, but they're slowly learning.

[Dani Wolkowicki]

Also, if you think we have it bad, check out Bytes.com lately. Eesh.