I was wondering who our elder forums are.

• What is the name and link to your forum?
• How old is your forum?
• How did your forum get started?
• Provide a short history of your forum software. Where did you start, and when did you come to Discourse?
• How active has your forum been over the years?

Here is a summary of Elder Forums

My forum LotusElan.net will be 23 years old this April. The community has existed since 1999.

We started in 1999 as a ONElist mail group. ONElist was purchased by eGroups and then purchased by Yahoo Groups. In 2003, we started our forum using Invision and migrated to phpBB version 2 in 2005. In 2025 we moved over to Discourse.

We still have 121 active members from our first year.

Actually my history with Discourse begin with this community 6 years ago but my own instance has almost 2 years

I did my praised my personal experience here:

I am so pround and glad with my instance and I just can be thankful to CDCK for that.

How old is your forum? MineralRightsForum began November 2009 - online 16 yrs now

How did your forum get started? Simple hunch that there was a need.

Provide a short history of your forum software. Where did you start, and when did you come to Discourse? Started with Ning, migrated to Discourse in May 2018. An excellent move.

How many members have been active since your first year? Great question. I’d estimate several hundred.

The Magicball Netwok is 25.5 years old (October 2000). Actually a bit older as before that I had a temporary forum online for a few months, but that history is gone.
I started the forum not long after I bought a computer which I could run as a server on my university provider internet connection. The forum was running on vBulletin (final version 3.8) for 24 years until I migrated to Discourse, which took me about a year to prepare as I working on an improved import script for vB 3.
I created the forum to move an existing community which existed on the InsideTheWeb forums since 1997. InsideTheWeb had many problems and even died not long after I created the new forum.
I is not really a big forum and active forum, the subject is rather niche: a video game series which had a release in 1994 and 1997; and eventually a remake in 2024. It is still visited by a bunch of people I met online in 1997, and new people which have we’ve picked up along the way.
Originally I had no plan to migrate the forum away from the ancient vBulletin 3.8 install. The forum’s activity was decreasing a lot given the subject manner and the likes of Facebook keeping people in that ecosystem. Effort to keep vBulletin running while PHP kept introducing new problems with the old codebase kept increasing. Paying money to migrate to a newer vBulletin seemed like a waste, also vB 4 and leter were not really better forums, as they tried to pivot to a social network. I had already decided years before that if I would migrate to different software I would migrate to Discourse.
I think somewhere in 2018 I installed Discourse as an internal forum at work as a place where consultants to workout, discuss, and vote for certain product improvements which me might eventually put on a roadmap. (Unless a customer was footing the bill for the development.) But that plan never worked out. But I loved the setup of Discourse, and the fact that it was open source.

My forum, self-hosted discourse since October 2018, descends from a G+ community started December 2012. We’ve presently got 160 monthly active users.

My forum was established nine months ago.
Though the number of active users is modest, it possesses a certain charm.
This forum was created to facilitate discussions about the game server I operate.

I administer a small forum dating back to 2002. It has been hosted on phpBB for many years until a migration to Discourse in 2018.

The community was unfortunately in bad shape for multiple reasons. People migrated from forums to Facebook groups, and phpBB was a prehistoric software that didn’t align with the modern Internet and people’s habits, and wasn’t smartphone-compatible.

The migration was done late, but not too late, in the sense that while the community remains small, it has a solid core of long-time users and still has new registration from time to time. So, I’d say it’s healthy, even though most people still use Facebook groups, but also other or newers means of communication like WhatsApp or Signal.

Here’s the average number of monthly created posts from 2002 to 2026:

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Can you spot the golden era of forums?

[edit: the forum activity was also closely tied to the sport popularity, as it’s quite niche]

You can see the activity decreasing a lot from 2016 to 2018, almost to the point of no activity, when the migration from phpBB to Discourse happened.

The huge spike in 2020-2021 was a Discourse bug that updated all posts’ creation dates from a large single topic to the same day.

Over the last year, an average of 350 posts have been created each month.

My other community was online since 1993, using newsgroups. I think it was created by Kevin Gilbertson. If it wasn’t, he was at least active on the newgroups, created the forum with vBulletin in 2001 and imported the newsgroups messages.

Which means that on our forum today, you can still read 33-year-old posts from the same community

Then, same story as above applies. Forum turns into a derelict, bad software, no mobile view, and migration to Discourse.

Same graph as above (posts per month):

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2021 was the Discourse migration. Activity decreased in 2023-2024, but never to the point of being dead, which was almost the case before the migration.

Community is healthy as well, averaging 800 posts a month.

Both forums would be 100% dead if I had not migrated them to Discourse.

I won’t lie tho: even if those communities aren’t going to disappear anytime soon, it’s a challenge to make them grow these days, where social media algorithms keep attracting people (I’m tempted to add “sometimes against their will”) and keep them hostage to their opaque and addictive algorithms.

Sorry, you have been blocked

You are unable to access mineralrightsforum.com

Not very welcoming…

Interesting choice of having multiple links in your menu for different forum categories. I thought there were different forums at first:

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LBA! Talk about a niche forum!

I’m very surprised to see an active community for this game. It wasn’t even multiplayer, or… Moddable I guess?

These are the top categories within the forum, and we provide links directly to them in our navigation to make them easy to find. This evolved from very early SEO and navigation work.

I found your posts-per-month graph interesting. We have a similar trend, but not as dramatic. My niche has an upper limit of about 15,000 potential users worldwide.

image796×347 48.3 KB

The other graph that has been interesting is the new signups graph over the last 20 years. I call this the Discourse bump. It is nice to see how newer tech makes it easier to join.

image797×341 46.5 KB

We average about 800 to 900 posts per month with a DAU/MAU of 30%.

I have added a summary table to the initial post to track our Elder Forums.

Wow, that’s incredibly steady activity
How did you avoid users leak to other platforms (facebook groups among others)?

I should have added in my post that my forums’ activity is also very tied to the sport popularity. There was a massive gain of interest in the mid-2000s, and it then decreased over time.

There are always multiple factors

It’s a pity that we can’t write relative dates in Discourse. Like XX years ago, from a given date (or perhaps I just didn’t find how to do it).

Should newsgroups be considered as a forum?
In my case, the community was the same when it transitioned from newsgroups to phpBB.
Our community went through multiple migrations, and no doubt will go through other migrations in the future, perhaps to new communication software very different from what we know today

I mentioned this multiple migration phenomenon here:

There have been several reasons for being able to avoid the social media leaks.

1. Very Small Target Population. Our site is about the Lotus Elan vehicle from the 1960s and 70s. Only ~13,000 cars were produced. Assuming every current and past owner joined the forum, we have an upper ceiling of 15,000 members.
2. Deep Technical Information. If you want to understand how to diagnose or fix any issues related to a Lotus Elan, we are the best website. We have already discussed in great detail, or we have the people who can help. 57,000 images help - yes, we need photos of the direction of fiberglass strands in the body work.
3. Good Core Group. We have people who want to see the Lotus Elan survive and succeed. Being a Lotus owner makes you a little weird and different. We like helping others with our shared affliction: Lotus ownership.

We have people say things like, “I visit other places like Facebook and Instagram, but when I need help, LotusElan.net is where I go.”

If you look at the reasons, these are steep hills for a competitor to overcome for a very small target market.

My forum was created in 2024:

It was created as a space for tech enthusiasts, and I joined and helped make it a little better.

It’s now extremely dead. There was a boom of activity when I joined, and I helped with that.

Then I became a co-owner and started a forum security team.

Over the summer, the forum died out.

I still work diligently on maintaining it from the forum aspect while inviting and occasionally posting.

It’s been a week… at 502 Bad Gateway . Since the weekend is here, it’s time to try and fix this!