Non-Web Publisher Forums

[KLB]

Has anyone else ever noticed that forums run by individuals who are not "professional" web publishers routinely have reliability issues? For instance there is a science forum and log home industry forum that I like to participate in, but I regularly have problems accessing these forums for what appear to be server reliability problems.

The thing is, I almost never see these problems with forums that are obviously run by a "professional" web publisher who is truly trying to run a profitable forum.

[Chris]

I think its true not just for forums but for many sites. Its always a dead giveaway when they use the default colors with the forum brand logo image still at the top.

See WebMythWorld for instance. Not really run by professionals, horrible design, tons of reliability issues.

[MaxS]

Well, what did you expect? Technology isn't their expertise.

[FPU]

KLB, there is not a lot of money in running forums, especially small one's, so people lose interest in them in most cases.

One problem with forums are, if you are not there everyday, it is a sure thing that spam bots, content scrapers and spammers will doom it quickly, there are so many spammers operating from blacklisted proxy IP's that if they are not banned (the IP's), after a while the compounding of all of them amount to a DDoS.

[Cutter]

Same here, I have two forums I frequent that are not industry related and clearly run by amateurs. One I specifically said I would pay for vBulletin if they would run it. Instead they got rid of phpboard and went to invision.