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The current state of developer forums.

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 3:38 pm
by markusn00b
I signed up here a while back after finding this place a fruitful resource for fruity men. I mean, a fruitful resource for all things PHP. However, I had prior commitments (if you can call it that) to another developer forum where I had put a lot of time and effort in. I'd also just been 'promoted' to a moderator, so I had even more commitment to it: cleaning up spam, etc. Anyway, a year or so back, this forum was incredibly popular. Hundreds of posts per day in the PHP forum (which is where I moderated) and also across the rest of the forum - it was a general IT experts community with forums ranging from most popular programming languages, to database administration. Things were so good in fact that we [the moderating staff] were even being given presents from the site admin. However, over the past couple of months, the quality of the forums has dropped steadily. We're now down to maybe 10-15 posts per day (in the PHP forum) and most of those are of unreadable quality; foreigners speaking in broken English, requesting complete codez. It's gotten to the point where many of the respected members are saying sayonara!

I was wondering, is this a trend you have also noticed, or is it only my forum that is headed for the grave yard?

Mark.

Re: The current state of developer forums.

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 4:19 pm
by califdon
I don't think I have discerned a trend, as such. Of course we get some hopelessly confused and uninformed posts and our share of spam, but I haven't noticed any trend over the past 2 years or so. Possibly others have.

Re: The current state of developer forums.

Posted: Sun Oct 11, 2009 5:29 pm
by John Cartwright
I certainly have noticed of alot more newcomers to PHP than seasoned developers, however, I don't think I have noticed a decrease in traffic.

If I had access to our google analytics I'm sure I would be able to assertain any trends, but alas, I don't.