are the ads killing the forum?

[taxico]

or is it the closing of the taps on foreign manpower?

and on the topic of ads. i think there're too many of them. i just turned off my adblocker and holy moley... the colorful non-threaded ones sprouted everywhere!

my lunar new year's wish is: i hope "Search property" would be properly embedded on the right side of the screen - above googleads instead of the main area where it affects the way the forum loads.

[Strong Eagle]

I find that the pages load very slowly because of all the ad re-directions that need to be loaded.

[PNGMK]

I think the forum is slowly dying for many reasons. I've been a member of many over the last decade and this one and another one are the only ones I visit on a declining basis.

[Max Headroom]

Ditto.

I guess it's just another case of deja-vu all over again: disrupt or be disrupted.

We seem to be whatsupping more than visiting forums now. Similarly, we hardly ever watch tv anymore, as most of our home entertainment is derived from pc or tab.

The insane number of commercials tv broadcasters here force-feed their remaining viewers nowadays is probably just hastening their demise, before going the way of horse and carriage, analog film cameras and pagers.

And forums.

[x9200]

If you look at the technical fora, they exist based on a very similar scenario - a limited number of regulars and a big number of adhoc visitors with their current problems they prefer to be solved in more interactive fashion. Here is exactly the same, except that the interested population is much limited.

2 decades ago, Usenet or mailing groups were the kings and fed the hungry for social interactions. Now this hunger is satisfied by FB, twitter and such. People are losing their real social lives to them so no wonder such fora also struggle.

[community@lithan]

but i guess ads are necessary to keep forums going