Should dish_dash swallow his pride and retire?

I hope this can be resolved quickly. There are certainly many S*** Small PTP Races and S*** small topics @dish_dash can contribute to. His best days are clearly behind him, but maybe Patrick Lefevere can come out of retirement and unban him to give him a second lease on forum life. He deserves better than to have his career ended in December. He should at the very least get a 2 year retirement deal with Israel Premier Startup Up Nation Tech.

Not since he flounced off in a big huff

Here's a pic of Tom Boonen in a bath of beans to entice him back

Posters in Cake Stop have been insanely rude to him for years and eventually he left. A lot of people are calling it a "flounce" so they don't have to ask questions about their own behaviour.

(He's fine, better off for being out of it, but shame he has gone from Prorace too)

Should have been a fountain.

Forums in general have been dying for a couple of decades now. Social media, discord servers, chat groups etc have supplanted them.

Could set up a newsnet newsgroup I guess....

Wtf

This is exactly what happened with the old MBUK forum which is where I came here from - a load of people moved over to a successor forum UKMB when MBUK was merged into Bikeradar (think that's roughly what happened, but don't quote me). I guess that will have been about 2007?

It was pretty popular for a while (more active users than BR has today to begin with) then just slowly petered out. There was a hardcore of a small number of posters who posted regularly (a bit like in here), then it eventually died when whoever paid the hosting bill stopped paying it (even though someone else offered to take it on). I still recognise some of the usernames from MBUK from time to time, but not normally in Pro Race (cake stop or over in the MTB bit - which appears to be dead now as well).

Without the hook of the articles or other content etc to bring new members in I don't see how you'd really attract new members, so it'll eventually die out through attrition.

As mentioned above I think most new post communities are being formed on Discord etc these days, standalone forums are pretty much dead/dying.

The only one I know of where it seems to have worked (i.e., not connected to something like a magazine or piece of software) was Snowheads - that was born out of the SCGB (ski club of great britain) forum doing something that resulted in some kick off that I don't really know the details of - something to do with requiring a SCGB membership maybe, but that was well before my time (think it started around 2004). But the hook there is people post on the ground conditions reports (which is pretty useful for skiing! Only reason I go there these days) and you can get good advice on trip planning. Probably it is currently helped by the fact that skiing crowd skews a bit older so likely still into forums since internet forums are really a 90s/00s phenomenon.

I can't imagine many new ones have taken off since the late 00s when Twitter and Facebook took off - the only people who are likely still going to be using forums are people who were already embedded on the internet before social media really kicked off. Which means something like, you must have already using one or more forums regularly before (say) 2006, which probably means being at least mid-late teens in the mid-00s, which by extension means the youngest people who would still be going to a classic forum for info (rather than some other social media) are probably roughly in their mid 30s today (ahem).

Waves at @dish_dash

Are you on parole?

Hurrah... welcome back