Photobucket, and the Loss of Knowledge

[texanidiot25]

This isn't a critique of 67-72ChevyTrucks.com (this was written elsewhere), but this is a thought I've been having on the larger situation with automotive forums, especially after Photobucket pulled the plug on remote hosting with no warning, extorting users to regain hosting privileges.

Forums have provided me with a wealth of information that I could've never found on the street, but it's time to take a step back and look at the state of things and see what needs to be done to preserve the decades of knowledge we've built across this world wide web. Build threads, tech info, and more have been destroyed recently, and I see this as a problem for the greater automotive community as the vendors and sites we use age on.



What's the post-forum-era solution? We're on the verge of losing a mass of 20+ years of knowledge, and it's a info grab we need to focus on.

Photobucket has done everything they can in their failure to support their business in a user-friendly way (ultimately blaming ad blockers) to burn their entire userbase, paid and free, and tell everyone to F-off, and this can be expected by the other small hosts. There's likely only a short amount of time to save even PB's hostage content (there's some short-term work-arounds to download the hidden image), and the main issue is that many people are not around any longer to back-up their photos, someone's gotta do it in their absence.

Facebook is too vapid, they've already begun date-limiting searches and masking old content with in groups. It's still on record on some server, sure, but they're not there for you to archive information.

BB forums are falling out of favor for discussion and many are shooting themselves in the foot in politics, with both sponsor-supported and private forums driving off users for a myriad of reasons while forgetting how to cull the herd of bad content. Even with a good photo host, it's a time consuming process to build even simple posts with BB code and forum software has often been left forgotten and out of date, meaning user-friendliness is still stuck in the 56K WARNING!!! dial-up days.

Everyone splitting back into their corners of personal blogs and whatnot will never work as forums were also well-sorted by Google and people do not have time today to seek a bunch of individual destination sites.

With that nail in the coffin, it's not going to be too long until the larger forums struggle, and we've watched small-to-medium forums suffer heavy user losses (and it's not uncommon to hear about the closing of one, these days). Photobucket killing one of the reasons people use forums will accelerate that decline as reference material loses its value without photos.

Recently, Wiki-how pages have begun to host valuable content, taking the SloppyMechancs as a role model of modern community knowledge gathering. A Facebook group is where daily discussion happens, but important information is archived in a Wiki, separating the fluff from the stuff people actually need to know. Some forums have distilled community info into archives, while leaving the greater discussion on the boards.

Should users and forum owners begin campaigning to collect stickies and important tech info and find ways to archive it now? Where should it be hosted? Do we need 'another' message board, or is there a better platform to archive this info on?