Over the last week, I’ve interacted with a couple traditional forums, and they were case lessons in how not to run a forum in 2026.
It’s a harder time for forums these days. Gone are the halcyon time of the early 2000s, when they were community meeting places and money machines. USENET was the original Internet hangout, and then when the web came along, people began building forums, which were a lot easier to use. People flocked to them, and there was a forum for everything. I remember even relatively obscure niches had multiple forums.
Fori are neither cheap nor easy to run. Not only do you need relatively high-powered servers, but you need a crew of moderators. And unless you’re doing it as a community service, you also have to sell advertising to pay the bills, and all the headaches that entails.
Running a forum was a handful back then, but now jump forward to 2026. Most of the audience has moved to even easier-to-use platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Facebook. Sure, there are still communities around different niches, but a lot of the low-hanging-fruit traffic (quick Q&A, reviews, etc.) is gone. Servers and bandwidth have gotten cheaper, but now you have DDoS and a galaxy of security threats to deal with. And now AI has made bots and spam a never-ending nuisance.
So if I was running a forum in 2026, I’d want it to be as easy-to-use and newcomer-friendly as possible. But not everyone does, apparently.
Example One: The Tortoise
I recently joined a forum that attracts members from across my state. It’s a niche that drives people to want to share experiences, and long-form posting is ideal. It’s the kind of niche where you want to look at ads because the vendors are obscure.
After signing up, I got the usual “you must activate the email link”. Fine. But then I went into a moderator approval queue. A couple days went by. C’mon guys…
Finally, I was approved, so I posted in the Introductions section. And…moderator queue. A day goes by. Got a couple replies…cool. Then I posted a reply and…moderator queue.
I get that people are trying to prevent spam. But this kind of gating just kills conversational momentum. It’s a lot better policy to police after the fact and remove bad content than to prevent it by making every…single…interaction have to go through a human.
The fact that the forum was running phpBB didn’t help, either.
Example Two: The Video
I used to work in the trucking industry. Back then, I read a forum somewhat frequently to hear industry gossip, and also read gossip about my own employer. But that was years ago.
The other day I got an email from the forum saying “hey, we miss you!”
Well, what the heck…I remember some old hands there that were fun to chat with. So I hopped over, and was greeted with an interstitial that said “Watch a one-minute video for 24 hours’ access to this forum”.
Are you kidding me?
I don’t mind seeing ads, and I don’t block ads. But I’m not going to sit and watch some silly advertisement just for the privilege of interacting with your community…especially when I’m the product that the forum is selling to its advertisers. And in this case, advertising is very plentiful because there are tons of trucking companies looking to hire, companies selling products to truckers, etc.
Forums these days need to be friction-free and bend over backwards to attract and retain members. These kinds of roadblocks do nothing except kill engagement and drive potential members to places where participating is easier.
raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
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