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Old 08-15-2018, 07:48 AM   #14 (permalink)
adidasss
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tore View Post
It would definitely be sad to see all that posting history go. It's easy to migrate a database containing all threads & posts to a new forum, but indeed that would require some help from Yac / owners and - unless things have changed, I personally don't see that happening. If they were willing to get that involved with the technical side of things, they might as well update this site.
I really know very little about technology and I'm not entirely sure I'm following you here but when you say move to a new forum, you mean a forum not owned by the owners of musicbanter? I don't know why they would be interested in doing that at all. The one thing I hope is that, if the time comes where this place just doesn't pay off to keep, they would let us know and offer us the option to continue by ourselves. I'm not sure what the cost of upkeep for a site like this would be but I imagine it couldn't be more than a private torrents site and those things have (successful) fund raisers all the time. Granted, there are probably more people on those but I figure there would be people here interested to contribute.

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Regarding forums in general, I am a member of several and to me it seems that those which thrive the most (are most active) tend to have meaningful discussions that are on topic and make sense to outsiders. For example, posts generally add meaning to a discussion which doesn't stray off topic to be about some internal drama between members or going-ons in the community (which an outsider wouldn't "get" anyways).
Interesting. I used to be a member of more forums and my experience is that a success of a forum depends also on the topic of the forum. If there is a lot of people interested in what it has to offer, it will thrive regardless of the amount of moderation. I would say the topic also determines what kind of crowd it attracts. Probably the technical forums you mentioned you frequent automatically attract maybe older, more mature people who are very knowledgeable about those things and want to exchange thoughts with fellow knowledgeable people. Music forums attract a much more diverse crowd because everyone can talk about music.

They might be out there, but to be honest, I don't know better, more mature, focused forums dedicated to music. Do you know any? I just googled music forums and I got few results, and the other ones seemed pretty deserted compared to here.

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It takes a lot of moderation to keep forums like that and I genuinely get that not all people enjoy that kind of moderated environment. It would actually make sense that MB today is mostly made up of people who don't like that and who are happy to stay a small, tight, internal community, even if that means there's going to be less participants over time and that the site will become less relevant in the bigger scope of online music discussions. That's a completely legit opinion to have too and I respect that.
I don't really know that it's true that it's becoming less relevant and having less participants. Maybe it goes through ups and downs but if it's failing, it's sure taking its sweet time about it.

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What could still be an issue to any user is - how far can you trust the owners? They're the ones who manage all those posts and threads that we care about. Do you know they're gonna take care of it in a good way? That's the kind of question which increasingly bothered me when I was an active user here. It seemed to me like it could all be gone one day. So, I still have backups in text format of some of my posts here (reviews and guides).

It seems ironic that as a community becomes so entrenched and so tightly knit - everyone knows everyone - that they shouldn't also want ownership and more control of the very platform that enables them to get together.
It makes sense to me. It's just that I don't think that can happen, while keeping all the databases, until this place stops being profitable to the owners, only then could the members think about taking over.

Again, I really hope they wouldn't just pull the plug. I understand that Yac had the decency to announce his departure in the mod cave, I assume the new Yac would announce the possibility of a shutdown in some way and offer us options.

Can you really trust any forum though? What happen at my previous forum was that the owners simply decided to do an upgrade one day from a clean slate, without asking for opinions. So I'm a little weary of updates to honest. And it does seem like the current owners want to spend as little money here as possible. Which kind of makes sense to me. I'm not convinced an update in the software would increase the traffic. Not even sure how much that would cost or how much they're making here, but it can't be that much, or certainly not enough to go into those kinds of expenses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tore View Post
Anyways, back then I felt that they should have thrown us a bone or something. The community here is part responsible for why this is a revenue earning site at all (besides age and good google rankings), so it would be cool if they would do something for us. However, I got the impression it would be more cost-effective to do nothing, even if that meant leaving the site to decline in various ways. Or possibly they felt that my radical suggestions were too much of a gamble.. That could be.
But what do the users here want actually?
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