_Silence_ said:
Unfortunately that's true.… So I would like to believe that there's some future for forums, but maybe in other forms. There's also a second beast behind this. 2000 is far away now…

Agree with everything you said. Part of the reason for this revision of the site was to find a path to a better forum / community platform to try to align better with the world's expectations driven by well funded/VC backed growth platforms. I took a risk in going with a completely custom solution purely in the interest of trying to discover what that better platform would look like. Early experiments in using off the shelf/open source solutions always led back to the same old formula that we had for years but that did not meet expectations for the modern audience. So, I took a chance.

The design was (and is) going to be incremental, a bit of a discovery in what works well and what doesn't. I've slowly been looking at next steps on this, but it's a big challenge and a fun creative pursuit in some respects, but also very daunting. One of the other challenges is finding the community experience that retains the value of forums while incorporating other things like blogs, projects, portfolios, etc. without following every other social media pattern, which I don't believe works for something like GameDev.net.

I've considered open sourcing the platform code with the idea that maybe others would be interested in helping out, but I need to do a security review on some of the hacks and devops pipeline which on its own will take time. 🙂

There's also the problem of retaining what is now 24+ years of culture for a very technical audience. Despite the world evolving I'm convinced there is still a value in a platform like this for those interested in these game development technologies at a deeper level, and for me the validation of this interest is that in spite of lower forum traffic over the years, GameDev.net continues to see new member signups (~20000/year total, ~8000/year are spam accounts though…whole other topic), projects posted and updated regularly, and blog posts.

Anyway, appreciate the comments. In the early days we had a group of people to share these sorts of thoughts with. These days it's a little more of a personal echo chamber. 🙂