PB Nation dead...?

[MAr]

[Chuck E Ducky]

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[Chuck E Ducky]

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[Chuck E Ducky]

Big Mike made the call and the TecPB hold outs ran down PBN at the 50spot.

[PBPilot]

this is a highly under appreciated post

[scottieb]

I miss when the Caturday thread was going strong.

[DocsMachine]

I'm genuinely curious what the owner has in mind for the place. Does John own it, or is he just the admin? If he's the admin, is he doing it for actual pay or just in some forlorn hope the place doesn't die completely? If he does own it... what's the plan? Hope BBS type forums come back? I mean, I'd like that, too, but I genuinely don't see that happening anytime soon.

Unfortunately, it's a catch-22: Nobody posts there because there's no one to read it, and nobody's there to read because nobody posts anything.

Anybody have any insight?

And, just 'cause I feel like a busybody, I think part of the problem was PBN spread out too much. I've mentioned it here a couple of times- people ask for a specific subsection for a style of play or a brand of marker, and that just splits traffic and, I believe, reduces overall interaction.

I mentioned earlier in this thread that one of the big things Facebook does is feeds you your interests. You don't have to go looking for it, it's right there in your feed. In a place like PBN, you'd want to check the News section, the tournaments section, the section for games in your area, and two or three marker-specific sections, and then go see if there's anything in BST that you couldn't live without.

That's work- not hard work, but you have to make the effort, FB feeds it all to you automatically.

The separation worked back when the place was getting 100K page views a day, and thousands of new posts/submissions, but when all of that is down in the hundreds? Splitting a hundred posts up into fifty sections means there's basically no real traffic. (And I'm not sure PBN gets even 20 posts a day, let alone a hundred.)

Doc.

[TF_Aloha]

And, just 'cause I feel like a busybody, I think part of the problem was PBN spread out too much. I've mentioned it here a couple of times- people ask for a specific subsection for a style of play or a brand of marker, and that just splits traffic and, I believe, reduces overall interaction.

I mentioned earlier in this thread that one of the big things Facebook does is feeds you your interests. You don't have to go looking for it, it's right there in your feed. In a place like PBN, you'd want to check the News section, the tournaments section, the section for games in your area, and two or three marker-specific sections, and then go see if there's anything in BST that you couldn't live without.

That's work- not hard work, but you have to make the effort, FB feeds it all to you automatically.

The separation worked back when the place was getting 100K page views a day, and thousands of new posts/submissions, but when all of that is down in the hundreds? Splitting a hundred posts up into fifty sections means there's basically no real traffic. (And I'm not sure PBN gets even 20 posts a day, let alone a hundred.)

Doc.

I think switching over to an old Reddit style site (not the current hellscape) would work really well. You can still have 50+ forums, but users can subscribe to the ones they want. Then, your homepage just feeds the new activity from those forums into one place. It would have the same ease of Facebook but without algorithmic meddling in what you see. Maybe even let users have two homepages so that B/S/T can be segregated and they don't have their actual discussion threads hidden beneath a mile of idiots typing "bump" every hour.

[RPP]

I'm genuinely curious what the owner has in mind for the place. Does John own it, or is he just the admin? If he's the admin, is he doing it for actual pay or just in some forlorn hope the place doesn't die completely? If he does own it... what's the plan? Hope BBS type forums come back? I mean, I'd like that, too, but I genuinely don't see that happening anytime soon.

Unfortunately, it's a catch-22: Nobody posts there because there's no one to read it, and nobody's there to read because nobody posts anything.

Anybody have any insight?

And, just 'cause I feel like a busybody, I think part of the problem was PBN spread out too much. I've mentioned it here a couple of times- people ask for a specific subsection for a style of play or a brand of marker, and that just splits traffic and, I believe, reduces overall interaction.

I mentioned earlier in this thread that one of the big things Facebook does is feeds you your interests. You don't have to go looking for it, it's right there in your feed. In a place like PBN, you'd want to check the News section, the tournaments section, the section for games in your area, and two or three marker-specific sections, and then go see if there's anything in BST that you couldn't live without.

That's work- not hard work, but you have to make the effort, FB feeds it all to you automatically.

The separation worked back when the place was getting 100K page views a day, and thousands of new posts/submissions, but when all of that is down in the hundreds? Splitting a hundred posts up into fifty sections means there's basically no real traffic. (And I'm not sure PBN gets even 20 posts a day, let alone a hundred.)

Doc.

To my shady knowledge John is no longer assosicaed with it and its owned by Vertical Scope.

[kevin qmto]

I'm genuinely curious what the owner has in mind for the place. Does John own it, or is he just the admin? If he's the admin, is he doing it for actual pay or just in some forlorn hope the place doesn't die completely? If he does own it... what's the plan? Hope BBS type forums come back? I mean, I'd like that, too, but I genuinely don't see that happening anytime soon.

Unfortunately, it's a catch-22: Nobody posts there because there's no one to read it, and nobody's there to read because nobody posts anything.

Anybody have any insight?

And, just 'cause I feel like a busybody, I think part of the problem was PBN spread out too much. I've mentioned it here a couple of times- people ask for a specific subsection for a style of play or a brand of marker, and that just splits traffic and, I believe, reduces overall interaction.

I mentioned earlier in this thread that one of the big things Facebook does is feeds you your interests. You don't have to go looking for it, it's right there in your feed. In a place like PBN, you'd want to check the News section, the tournaments section, the section for games in your area, and two or three marker-specific sections, and then go see if there's anything in BST that you couldn't live without.

That's work- not hard work, but you have to make the effort, FB feeds it all to you automatically.

The separation worked back when the place was getting 100K page views a day, and thousands of new posts/submissions, but when all of that is down in the hundreds? Splitting a hundred posts up into fifty sections means there's basically no real traffic. (And I'm not sure PBN gets even 20 posts a day, let alone a hundred.)

Doc.

John doesn't own it, he used to be a paid administrator of the site, but that ended like 5 years ago. He still has admin privileges though, and occasionally uses them but the site is kind of adrift at sea now. No one is at the wheel, unless they volunteer time to clean it up a bit.

[Tarsun2]

hmmm maybe ill log back in and start posting, for the hellofit.

[Jonnydread]

haha MCB just de facto absorbs PBN like a hungry twin in the womb

[DocsMachine]

I posted a couple times last Friday. Both links to my .50 cal videos, one in the .50 cal section, which at this point has received five views and no replies; and once in a nine-year-old .50 cal thread in the "News" section, which has gotten somewhere around 20-30 views, and also no replies.

Several sections, however, have gotten several hundred fresh spam posts in that time, which have yet to be cleaned up.

I wonder what would happen if we started posting links back to MCB? "Hey, we have actual people and get actual replies over here!"

Doc.

[martix_agent]

I posted a couple times last Friday. Both links to my .50 cal videos, one in the .50 cal section, which at this point has received five views and no replies; and once in a nine-year-old .50 cal thread in the "News" section, which has gotten somewhere around 20-30 views, and also no replies.

Several sections, however, have gotten several hundred fresh spam posts in that time, which have yet to be cleaned up.

I wonder what would happen if we started posting links back to MCB? "Hey, we have actual people and get actual replies over here!"

Doc.

They wont' ban you or anything. The forum is dead as a doornail. It merely exists as a way for the owner to get add money, from search engines pointing people to previously posted informaion.
There's exactly 2 threads that have constant action, and one of them is the same guy posting daily, just to keep it alive. It's really an act of love or madness at this point.
The other thread has had discussions about moving here, but the consensus is that enough of them like the close-knit group and they're afraid if they bring it over here, the industry insiders will get annoyed, and stop participating. .. and that's what makes that thread special. It's a place where discussion can be had without the annoyances of a large audience participating.

[The Hobbit]

Madness, definitely madness is what motivates him to keep that thread alive.

[vijil]

... I suppose there would once have been a chance to turn this into a thriving niche community, but then verticalscope happened.

They use pbn purely as content to drive ad revenue. They have no budget to improve any one of the thousands of old forums they own - it's much more effective for them to spend money on acquiring new forums, which they then use to help train their own AI and whatever else. They also don't respond to pretty much anything because it's not worth their money. They will never sell a forum, no matter how defunct, so long as it has good old content.

For clarity, their business model is to buy old forums and sites with lots of content that searchers will find in results, put their system on to display ads from their customers, and then buy more sites. That's it. That's the model.

Our only real hope is that AI search kills them off and we end up being able to buy it back cheap when they liquidate.

That's what happened. They got bought out by a forum vulture called verticalscope. I choose the word "vulture" carefully - VS's business model is picking over the carcasses of dead forums for any remaining morsels of profit. They don't bother with resus or revival.

I did a fair bit of digging with the aim of possibly buying pbn myself, but that's off the table under VS.

[Painthappy]

I tossed out an offer myself on the forums, but nothing. I just don't want to see the information disappear. So many sites just closed their doors and shut down and all the information just gone. pbreview was one such place.

[Jonnydread]

PBR! Oh man that brings me back. I spent so much time on dial up on those forums. So much misinformation, so little time ♥️♥️♥️

[vijil]

Painthappy it's worth making sure the archive.org backup is up to date for pbn. That'll keep the info. It's also possible to get plugins that'll download an entire site. You wouldn't be able to just post it up probably without VS suing, but when they're eventually done with the place it'll be an option to post as an archive.