I'm going to address this to Dale, since he's the only one I see on the forum but anyone else can feel free to jump in 🙂

I don't mean any disrespect but what happened? Did the forum software disrupt the community that much or did something else occur?

Just anecdotally, this will be the fourth forum I'm a member of that died after going to a Discourse-style community system.

Again, I'm not trying to badmouth the site, I'm just genuinely curious. The guys here have been saving me from my poor PHP scripting skills for over a decade.

    Well, we have been having a slow down in new members for quite awhile now, and then a bunch of persistent errors preceded the switchover in forum software, so we may have lost would-be contributors there. Then yeah, I'm not sure if this style of forum really is conducive to a community with a software focus.

      Schwim - you tell us..... You've posted a few times recently but then have a two year gap in posting... Where do people go when they disappear for two years?

      I personally think forums are a dying thing... But, they are only as good as the members make them.

      My all time favorite site is a sister site to this one... It's basically a Windows Operating System site... We used to get more new threads started in one day than the site gets in a month now... Ten to twelve years ago I never would have guessed in a million years that it would die.

      Steve_R_Jones Schwim - you tell us..... You've posted a few times recently but then have a two year gap in posting... Where do people go when they disappear for two years?

      If you look at member schwim2 , it will close some of that gap. The forum system had stopped sending emails and something occurred that forced a lost password reset and I was stuck so I created a second account so the forum could help me out of another pickle I had gotten myself into.

      That being said, there were long periods of absence, for reasons which you touch on below.

      Steve_R_Jones I personally think forums are a dying thing... But, they are only as good as the members make them.

      My all time favorite site is a sister site to this one... It's basically a Windows Operating System site... We used to get more new threads started in one day than the site gets in a month now... Ten to twelve years ago I never would have guessed in a million years that it would die.

      I think you're right. With very few exceptions, my go-to forums are on the way out. I feel like a dinosaur because I don't care for the new manner of discussion(Reddit, social channels, etc) and I don't really understand how they're the preferred manner of asking a question(I can see the allure for just hanging out with 257 of your closest friends).

      I do wonder, however, if the Discourse-style of forum does factor in somehow as well. I don't know if it's seen as too stripped down or what. Maybe it's nothing more than the fact that the change happens after the decline has already started and it just looks like a cause rather than a symptom.

      I selfishly hope you guys don't disappear. I don't have any Facebook friends to help me out of my next coding catastrophe 🙂

            Well, the forums run by the company I work for are even more of a "ghost town" than this one. So maybe the traditional forum is going the way of the Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), as Steve R Jones says. I would also corroborate Steve's other observation, that "they are only as good as the members make them".

            To go on at length ... as for participation from the community, we discussed some of our detractors/distractors a little in this old thread, we have competition from other sites, including some dedicated to PHP and some dedicated to programming in general (StackExchange's "schtick" on this seems to have convinced quite a few people [and search engines] that they are the bees' knees), and then there's the whole question of whether or not PHP is a dying language.

            Finally, speaking of dying, I'm of the opinion that this community and F/OSS in particular suffered bigtime when Tim Perdue died, even though he was no longer associated with PHPBuilder directly.

              Seems like for technical "forums", stack(overflow|exchange) is where I usually end up when searching for answers, but they don't have the social aspect of traditional forums; but then you can get "social" stuff at Twitter, Facebook, etc. (if you can put up with the "algorithms" and ads 😉 ).

              Also, summer is traditionally slower than the rest of the year, IIRC.

                NogDog

                Do you think that SEO/traffic grew organically? I can remember when PHPBuilder would appear pretty high in SERPs for a lot of questions I had BITD (early 00's ...)

                  dalecosp

                  Heh...SEO is all smoke and mirrors to me. Fortunately, I don't have to deal with it for the stuff I work on (mainly APIs for contracted clients). 🙂

                    It's nice to see the other names pop in. Maybe I just caught the forum on a bad week.

                    SExchange and I just do not mesh. I find it incredibly anti-personality and seems driven almost entirely by +1's and accepted answers. It's just not the place for me.

                    I have asked PHP questions in other forums but have never gotten the level and quality of assistance that has been provided here. I can say without exaggeration that Everything I know about PHP has at the very least been sprung from a topic I started here.

                    You guys are the bomb.

                    Weedpacket in particular has made my career, for what it's worth (hint: not as much in Joplin MO as either coast, for sure, or even STL or KC MO, nonetheless it's paying the bills). The other guys that were around in the early 00's were stellar as well, and the current crop of regulars still sharpens my blade quite often.

                    SO bothers me a little as well ... it's like they co-opted the FB 'like' button, added job listings and created a heady scramble to get to the top of the rat heap ....

                    schwim

                    I don't participate at /stack(overflow|exchange)/, in terms of asking or answering questions -- I just end up there a lot when googling for answers. 🙂

                        For many years, I have never seen this site appear in search results (Google). StackOverflow is often top two or three results. Possibly it's an SEO issue or possibly somehow momentum

                        Popularity? Nearly Javscript everything...

                        About a year or so ago here when I looked in I saw a bunch of weird posts - people attacking others. I know too well how hard it is to help people online, but this seemed quite spiteful to me.

                        Slack. There are so many communities of varying size where there is always somebody around to help out.

                        I learned so much from this place - I've always looked in over the years (didn't always post though). I noticed years ago this place was slowing down - I could never even answer questions because they were ALWAYS taken care of. I think the best thing I learned from this place, beyond just PHP, was RTFM.

                        Forums are totally dying. Did you notice that there was a major IRC announcement today? Maybe forums will have their day again, too.

                        Vaskerville Forums are totally dying. Did you notice that there was a major IRC announcement today?

                        irc.org saw an update to their site?

                          8 days later

                          As I just mentioned in another thread. The new forum killed it for me. I dont come here anymore.

                          Weedpacket

                          Hey Weedpacket!

                          I lurch in the shadows around here. @NogDog has a really good handle on answering the posts around here so I am not really needed. Plus this new forum design is rubbing me wrong for some reason. I am pretty active on a couple of the other forums.