The number of questions on Stack Overflow fell by 78 percent in December 2025 compared to a year earlier. Developers are switching en masse to AI tools in
A product I use still has an old school forum. The mods asked a while back whether to switch to Discord, and the responses were a resounding “NO”. It’s nice to have discussions organized by topics with descriptive titles that are indexed by search engines and are self-hosted by each organization instead of being centrally owned and controlled.
I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.
I hope an increasing number of projects come to realise the drawbacks of Discord, namely that you keep years’ worth of information on someone else’s centralised platform, and it’s very difficult to find past information even for members of the server, and impossible from the outside. I look at a handful of Discord channels daily, but had to mute some because users keep asking the same questions every two days…
Worrying that forums will dissappear too.
The only answer you’ll get are SKUM sponsored bullshit with embedded ads.
Remember before they destroyed the internet? Good times.
A product I use still has an old school forum. The mods asked a while back whether to switch to Discord, and the responses were a resounding “NO”. It’s nice to have discussions organized by topics with descriptive titles that are indexed by search engines and are self-hosted by each organization instead of being centrally owned and controlled.
I’m happy to see a bit of a renaissance of forums in the last few years. Quite a few open source projects now run forums built on the Discourse engine (open-source, can be self-hosted for free). I was kinda sceptical at first, they look so different from the BBCode forums I was used to, but over time came to appreciate the features that drag the forum format into the 21st century.
I hope an increasing number of projects come to realise the drawbacks of Discord, namely that you keep years’ worth of information on someone else’s centralised platform, and it’s very difficult to find past information even for members of the server, and impossible from the outside. I look at a handful of Discord channels daily, but had to mute some because users keep asking the same questions every two days…