So a long time ago I wrote an article for TCP Magazine on the history of forums (I forget the issue number). Anyhow, the rough theme of that article seemed to be about how the community had migrated around from/to different forums, split, diffused and so forth.

So I was wondering what the state of the world of forum's is right now? I mainly ask this cause I always assumed that PCF (formerly EntropiaForum) was still the "it" place. But I went on there the other day to look at the discussion on Entropia Partners that Tia linked me and it was only 3 pages long and with just a handful of people posting and one or two seemed to be nerks. I looked at the rest of the posts in "new" and it all seemed to be forsale/wanted posts... Even the front page now only contains client loader news...

As far as I knew last the entropia forum didn't really have a lot going on... but I think MA post there? Next island forum is pretty dead. I know virtualmindhive is largely dead. We have a bit of a buzzing community of arkadians on ark forum I think... I don't know much about how busy the cyrene forum is but guessing that is a small community.

So I guess the question is, what goes on? Personally I'd say this seems to be a combination of the game being better with more content than it used to have (so less need to spend our time on forums when there is other fun to be had) and that we have the different communities on different planets.

This is also the splitting of responsibility. We used to get this a lot in the old days with us only getting access to details through Marco. "I don't know, I guess we'd need to talk to the devs" or words to that effect was a typical comment. Now we have this "well we'd need to ask MA" line. With no access to the folks who know it makes more sense for communities to form around people they actually can talk to. ie the PP's with Ark leading the way from what I hear.

Not really sure where I am going with this really, maybe to say we should be trying to push EP a bit more. It seems to be the only forum with a bit of a community that sits squarely in the middle of things and covers not just the different planets but even limited discussion of other games and tech and science (which is nice).

Its starting to remind me now of the early e-pec days so it would be good to see things continue to develop.

Wistrel ...