This says all that you need to know - I don;t think I've ever seen this little activity in 6+ years - just TWO active threads in the past DAY in what used to be the most active section; other sections aren't much better:
However, nothing is more insane than this:
Members: 5,804,007
This is an increase of over 20,000 in just a few weeks, since my last post in this thread, with close to three-quarters of a million new members so far this year:
Most users online: 34,329 (Sep 25, 2014)
Online Users: 57 (56 members and 1 guest)
For a game as big and as rapidly growing as this, even when everybody was saying it was dying (around a year ago there was a thread about this at least once a week; I'd almost prefer to see more such threads just for the activity)?
A lot of people are either on the Minecraft discord or Reddit, especially Reddit, is what I feel. I personally prefer forums as I'm a bit old skool, I've run various message boards myself since 2002, the problem with places like Reddit is threads can get buried very quickly because of the high turnover - basic builds that get mass voted/memes/over-used trends like one chunk builds etc, a person sees one trend then it's copied to infinity.
Honestly the best advice is be as active as you can here, and participate (Or start threads) that interest you, you get out of it what you put into it in the end.
Like Minecraft forums or interested in my world? Try My message board, it's better moderated because I run it directly and have run Internet message boards for 21+ years! Better software and I have much more control to keep the content more up to date. Free to join, 13 years+.
I prefer forums too, and if a game's community does'int have a forum at all, or if it's forum shut down (like with WildTangent Forums) I use Reddit, then if there is'int a community for that I then use Discord which I don't like to use for answers because unlike forums and Reddit, Discord does'int keep track of messages after a certain amount of time from what I've heard.
When I need help, it is usually from the developer of games/world/map/pack/template/add-on as sold in the Marketplace (formerly shown on the in-Minecraft screen as Store). And some developers, if you can find contact information, are very helpful and responsive. Minecraft, as developer, is not. So, this forum usually says to contact the developer, and/or to file a bug report. So I do file but reports, but their system is tedious, NOT user friendly, and SLOW to respond. The posted responses at the bug report site often do not make sense. So I think that are some real issues that affect enjoyment of Minecraft, that just can not be answered by this Forum.
Forums aren't that popular nowadays with the popularity of reddit but I find it really hard to believe that the forums have ended up in such a pathetic state despite Minecraft being one of the most popular games of all time. Surely the forums could've capitalized on Minecraft's recent resurgence? Nope. Instead, the community just rots even more and as an insult to injury, citricsquid decides to nuke 30% of all posts in the forum and announces that they're shutting down a few weeks later. What a surprise. This is simply the result of bad management.
Yes I understand that curse had to comply with GDPR laws but I just feel that this entire fiasco was just overzealous and sloppy with very little planning/thought put into it.
There was definitely a better way to conduct this other than nuking every post after emailing the users while knowing that many of these accounts were made almost 10 years ago and many no longer be active/monitored. According to the announcement thread, you can't even restore your own posts if you somehow missed the email despite giving consent.
They could've maybe temporarily deleted their account while keeping the posts intact or look at what other sites do to comply with these laws. I'm sure Reddit didn't delete a third of all its posts.
But hey, gotta comply with your legal obligations right
After a few weeks I finally have the time to get around to this. Pardon my late response, mods, as I know grave digging is bad. So, at long last I can add my 2 cents to the pile. Here are what I think are the major factors for the decline:
-Discord
Contrary to what some others say Reddit is far, FAR from a replacement for forums. Discord is much closer to a forum, and has seen an incredible rise in popularity. Being able to talk on the spot, have pins, upload images on the spot, have pins, etc, are huge boons. The younger folk of today aren't used to the slower pace and comparatively clunky nature of forums, and are better versed in the former.
-Users scared off
Recently-ish the forums nuked an insane amount of posts and by extension mods and resources pretty much without warning, as well as going through a potential permanent shutdown. Naturally, the former was and still is a major shock to everyone, an the loss of precious posts, memories, and resources that will not be seen again is NOT to be taken lightly. To this day I myself am still ABSOLUTELY LIVID that it went down and I don't doubt it could have been handled in a far superior fashion. This, as well as the fact that those who've not checked in on the status of the MC forum as not down, has likely caused many members and groups in these forums to jump ship for places such as PlanetMinecraft, Discord, CurseForge, and so on.
-Minecraft is an old game
Minecraft turned 10 this year. Let that sink in. A 13 year old then is 23 now. From effectively a child to an adult that in some areas is able to smoke, drink, drive, be on their own, etc. A decade is a long time and a lot can change in that span. Many kids such as myself have grown up, and as such have either found new interests, got bored, or have became busy; sometimes all three of those!
With regards to account creation, bots are a big problem and massively inflate those numbers. However, bots are not the only thing roaming this website. People are, and even if they don't plan on doing anything, people will create accounts to potentially post with. I imagine many will not post at all, whereas some may just leave some posts numbering in the single or double digits, then fade away into history, never to be contacted again. It's haunting and creepy if I am to be frank. Adding on to all of that, Minecraft isn't quite in its days where it is still being discovered. It is THE best-selling game of all time. Everyone knows about it, and by extension are going to already know quite a few things about it, along with simply being able to discuss with friends in person, over Discord, or other means of contact outside of forums.
Then we also have the vicious cycle of low activity in itself causing lower activity.
Yes I understand that curse had to comply with GDPR laws but I just feel that this entire fiasco was just overzealous and sloppy with very little planning/thought put into it.
There was definitely a better way to conduct this other than nuking every post after emailing the users while knowing that many of these accounts were made almost 10 years ago and many no longer be active/monitored. According to the announcement thread, you can't even restore your own posts if you somehow missed the email despite giving consent.
I agree. They should have used the forum messaging system and banners to communicate this major change, in addition to emails. Even though I was/am a forum staff member, I wasn't even aware that a GDPR-related purge was going to occur until after it had happened.
They could've maybe temporarily deleted their account while keeping the posts intact or look at what other sites do to comply with these laws. I'm sure Reddit didn't delete a third of all its posts.
From what I know, the problem is the Curse developers coded a method to mass-temp-delete GDPR non-compliant accounts and hide their posts/threads, however they didn't bother to mark the posts so as to differentiate between GDPR-deleted posts and other deleted posts, nor did they provide any way to mass-undelete GDPR-deleted posts. We technically have the ability to restore peoples posts and threads if they do the GDPR acknowledgement, however we would have to undelete their posts practically one at a time, and would have to guess as to whether each post was deleted for GDPR reasons or non-GDPR reasons. This issue is likely not limited to just this forum -- it is probably an issue with all of the Curse (or former Curse) forums.
The final nail in the coffin was when the forum decided to do the twitch integration. The forum had been declining drastically since when I was on one of my other accounts, that is now defunct. However I noticed that over the years I spent here before the old fanbase completely left and left this place open to newer users, and now it has declined. I am not sure if there is anything we could do to remedy this, as it seems it's just the cycle of how things are going.
The one thing that discord lacks is a good sense of moderation. I've been to so many servers run by corrupt and toxic people. Discord is a breeding ground for those sorts of things and good servers are rare to find, at least in my personal experiences. The one thing forums have over discord for me is that they are much more chill and people are much more appealing to be around.
The final nail in the coffin was when the forum decided to do the twitch integration. The forum had been declining drastically since when I was on one of my other accounts, that is now defunct. However I noticed that over the years I spent here before the old fanbase completely left and left this place open to newer users, and now it has declined. I am not sure if there is anything we could do to remedy this, as it seems it's just the cycle of how things are going.
The one thing that discord lacks is a good sense of moderation. I've been to so many servers run by corrupt and toxic people. Discord is a breeding ground for those sorts of things and good servers are rare to find, at least in my personal experiences. The one thing forums have over discord for me is that they are much more chill and people are much more appealing to be around.
The forums started declining all the way back in 2013-2014, as seen by the yearly post count in the Java Survival Mode section (this used to be the most active "discussion" forum, as opposed to forums like modding or servers):
Note that this was BEFORE Twitch bought the forums - a decline of 97% between 2012 and 2017, with a slight rebound in 2014, but otherwise activity has been falling by around 50% year-over-year (it is hard to say what the current trend is from looking at archived pages since posts have been deleted but also restored; Survival Mode gained 163,000 posts over the past 6 months, many of which are likely older posts which were undeleted. A quick look at recently active threads suggests around 10 per day, so relatively speaking, Twitch didn't really do much to the forums, more so in absolute terms).
I agree. They should have used the forum messaging system and banners to communicate this major change, in addition to emails. Even though I was/am a forum staff member, I wasn't even aware that a GDPR-related purge was going to occur until after it had happened.
From what I know, the problem is the Curse developers coded a method to mass-temp-delete GDPR non-compliant accounts and hide their posts/threads, however they didn't bother to mark the posts so as to differentiate between GDPR-deleted posts and other deleted posts, nor did they provide any way to mass-undelete GDPR-deleted posts. We technically have the ability to restore peoples posts and threads if they do the GDPR acknowledgement, however we would have to undelete their posts practically one at a time, and would have to guess as to whether each post was deleted for GDPR reasons or non-GDPR reasons. This issue is likely not limited to just this forum -- it is probably an issue with all of the Curse (or former Curse) forums.
Well that's tragic. Years of minecraft history just lost because someone didn't have the foresight to create a system that could be reversible.
Do you think the posts could be restored one day or is it just gone forever because it's just too much work.
Well that's tragic. Years of minecraft history just lost because someone didn't have the foresight to create a system that could be reversible.
Do you think the posts could be restored one day or is it just gone forever because it's just too much work.
Even if there was a technical method of mass-restoring posts, the original authors of the various posts would still need to accept the GDPR acknowledgement before the posts would be restored. Maybe some of the information is cached by the Internet Archive and is still available to people who specifically search for it.
Even if there was a technical method of mass-restoring posts, the original authors of the various posts would still need to accept the GDPR acknowledgement before the posts would be restored. Maybe some of the information is cached by the Internet Archive and is still available to people who specifically search for it.
The problem with that is that you would have to have the link of the deleted post to access the archived page lol. A lot of old mods are already extremely obscure that require a lot of digging to find; finding the forum thread would be even harder.
The forums started declining all the way back in 2013-2014, as seen by the yearly post count in the Java Survival Mode section (this used to be the most active "discussion" forum, as opposed to forums like modding or servers):
Note that this was BEFORE Twitch bought the forums - a decline of 97% between 2012 and 2017, with a slight rebound in 2014, but otherwise activity has been falling by around 50% year-over-year (it is hard to say what the current trend is from looking at archived pages since posts have been deleted but also restored; Survival Mode gained 163,000 posts over the past 6 months, many of which are likely older posts which were undeleted. A quick look at recently active threads suggests around 10 per day, so relatively speaking, Twitch didn't really do much to the forums, more so in absolute terms).
That is quite true. The question I have is why is this forum declining? Is there a clean cut decision that is responsible or is it just some sort of thing that comes with an aging forum?
That is quite true. The question I have is why is this forum declining? Is there a clean cut decision that is responsible or is it just some sort of thing that comes with an aging forum?
A number of things including but not limited to the forum changing ownership multiple times, MC getting less popular, people unable to login to their old acc, broken links, mass deletion of threads but in my opinion, it's the decline of the forum format. How many forums are still active in this day and age. I guess people don't like digging through threads and sections to find the newest and most relevant content.
Source? The first reply on this thread completely contradicts this widespread idea that Minecraft is dying (at the end of the post) - which IMO is all down to personal dissatisfaction with the game (loss of personal or friends interest, having a favorite server shut down, and so on) - the overall number of players/sales has tripled since the forums really started going downhill (after 2014, when around 60 million copies had been sold, now it is 180 million).
The same also goes for the idea that the game has been "revived" recently - which is only true if you look at certain areas, like its popularity on YouTube (Minecraft had around 100 billion views last year, far more than any other game - but this was also the case the year before, prior to the "revival", and during an all-time post-2013 low according to Google search trends - the main metric used to claim that the game is dying - maybe it is just because everybody has heard of it by now, and the game now has a built-in recipe book so you don't need to search as much).
The problem with that is that you would have to have the link of the deleted post to access the archived page lol. A lot of old mods are already extremely obscure that require a lot of digging to find; finding the forum thread would be even harder.
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of looking at the archived forum at a point in time prior to the mass-deletion. For example, here is the archived suggestions forum section prior to the GDPR deletion. You can compare the pinned threads at the top with the current suggestion section to see that it has threads pinned that are no longer available.
I was wondering if these forums are still declining, or if the situation has improved since May.
This says all that you need to know - I don;t think I've ever seen this little activity in 6+ years - just TWO active threads in the past DAY in what used to be the most active section; other sections aren't much better:
However, nothing is more insane than this:
Members: 5,804,007
This is an increase of over 20,000 in just a few weeks, since my last post in this thread, with close to three-quarters of a million new members so far this year:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/forums/forum-discussion-info/2965026-are-these-real-members
Yet, we see this:
Most users online: 34,329 (Sep 25, 2014)
Online Users: 57 (56 members and 1 guest)
For a game as big and as rapidly growing as this, even when everybody was saying it was dying (around a year ago there was a thread about this at least once a week; I'd almost prefer to see more such threads just for the activity)?
Feb 2017: Minecraft has 55 Million Monthly Players, 122 Million Sales
Dec 2017: Minecraft had 74 million active players in December, a new record for the game
Oct 2018: 'Minecraft' is still one of the biggest games in the world, with over 91 million people playing monthly
Sep 2019: 'Minecraft' now has 112 million monthly players
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
A lot of people are either on the Minecraft discord or Reddit, especially Reddit, is what I feel. I personally prefer forums as I'm a bit old skool, I've run various message boards myself since 2002, the problem with places like Reddit is threads can get buried very quickly because of the high turnover - basic builds that get mass voted/memes/over-used trends like one chunk builds etc, a person sees one trend then it's copied to infinity.
Honestly the best advice is be as active as you can here, and participate (Or start threads) that interest you, you get out of it what you put into it in the end.
Closed old thread
Like Minecraft forums or interested in my world? Try My message board, it's better moderated because I run it directly and have run Internet message boards for 21+ years! Better software and I have much more control to keep the content more up to date. Free to join, 13 years+.
16yrs+ only
I prefer forums too, and if a game's community does'int have a forum at all, or if it's forum shut down (like with WildTangent Forums) I use Reddit, then if there is'int a community for that I then use Discord which I don't like to use for answers because unlike forums and Reddit, Discord does'int keep track of messages after a certain amount of time from what I've heard.
When I need help, it is usually from the developer of games/world/map/pack/template/add-on as sold in the Marketplace (formerly shown on the in-Minecraft screen as Store). And some developers, if you can find contact information, are very helpful and responsive. Minecraft, as developer, is not. So, this forum usually says to contact the developer, and/or to file a bug report. So I do file but reports, but their system is tedious, NOT user friendly, and SLOW to respond. The posted responses at the bug report site often do not make sense. So I think that are some real issues that affect enjoyment of Minecraft, that just can not be answered by this Forum.
Forums aren't that popular nowadays with the popularity of reddit but I find it really hard to believe that the forums have ended up in such a pathetic state despite Minecraft being one of the most popular games of all time. Surely the forums could've capitalized on Minecraft's recent resurgence? Nope. Instead, the community just rots even more and as an insult to injury, citricsquid decides to nuke 30% of all posts in the forum and announces that they're shutting down a few weeks later. What a surprise. This is simply the result of bad management.
Yes I understand that curse had to comply with GDPR laws but I just feel that this entire fiasco was just overzealous and sloppy with very little planning/thought put into it.
There was definitely a better way to conduct this other than nuking every post after emailing the users while knowing that many of these accounts were made almost 10 years ago and many no longer be active/monitored. According to the announcement thread, you can't even restore your own posts if you somehow missed the email despite giving consent.
They could've maybe temporarily deleted their account while keeping the posts intact or look at what other sites do to comply with these laws. I'm sure Reddit didn't delete a third of all its posts.
But hey, gotta comply with your legal obligations right
After a few weeks I finally have the time to get around to this. Pardon my late response, mods, as I know grave digging is bad. So, at long last I can add my 2 cents to the pile. Here are what I think are the major factors for the decline:
-Discord
Contrary to what some others say Reddit is far, FAR from a replacement for forums. Discord is much closer to a forum, and has seen an incredible rise in popularity. Being able to talk on the spot, have pins, upload images on the spot, have pins, etc, are huge boons. The younger folk of today aren't used to the slower pace and comparatively clunky nature of forums, and are better versed in the former.
-Users scared off
Recently-ish the forums nuked an insane amount of posts and by extension mods and resources pretty much without warning, as well as going through a potential permanent shutdown. Naturally, the former was and still is a major shock to everyone, an the loss of precious posts, memories, and resources that will not be seen again is NOT to be taken lightly. To this day I myself am still ABSOLUTELY LIVID that it went down and I don't doubt it could have been handled in a far superior fashion. This, as well as the fact that those who've not checked in on the status of the MC forum as not down, has likely caused many members and groups in these forums to jump ship for places such as PlanetMinecraft, Discord, CurseForge, and so on.
-Minecraft is an old game
Minecraft turned 10 this year. Let that sink in. A 13 year old then is 23 now. From effectively a child to an adult that in some areas is able to smoke, drink, drive, be on their own, etc. A decade is a long time and a lot can change in that span. Many kids such as myself have grown up, and as such have either found new interests, got bored, or have became busy; sometimes all three of those!
With regards to account creation, bots are a big problem and massively inflate those numbers. However, bots are not the only thing roaming this website. People are, and even if they don't plan on doing anything, people will create accounts to potentially post with. I imagine many will not post at all, whereas some may just leave some posts numbering in the single or double digits, then fade away into history, never to be contacted again. It's haunting and creepy if I am to be frank. Adding on to all of that, Minecraft isn't quite in its days where it is still being discovered. It is THE best-selling game of all time. Everyone knows about it, and by extension are going to already know quite a few things about it, along with simply being able to discuss with friends in person, over Discord, or other means of contact outside of forums.
Then we also have the vicious cycle of low activity in itself causing lower activity.
Figured it was time for a change.
I agree. They should have used the forum messaging system and banners to communicate this major change, in addition to emails. Even though I was/am a forum staff member, I wasn't even aware that a GDPR-related purge was going to occur until after it had happened.
From what I know, the problem is the Curse developers coded a method to mass-temp-delete GDPR non-compliant accounts and hide their posts/threads, however they didn't bother to mark the posts so as to differentiate between GDPR-deleted posts and other deleted posts, nor did they provide any way to mass-undelete GDPR-deleted posts. We technically have the ability to restore peoples posts and threads if they do the GDPR acknowledgement, however we would have to undelete their posts practically one at a time, and would have to guess as to whether each post was deleted for GDPR reasons or non-GDPR reasons. This issue is likely not limited to just this forum -- it is probably an issue with all of the Curse (or former Curse) forums.
- sunperp
The final nail in the coffin was when the forum decided to do the twitch integration. The forum had been declining drastically since when I was on one of my other accounts, that is now defunct. However I noticed that over the years I spent here before the old fanbase completely left and left this place open to newer users, and now it has declined. I am not sure if there is anything we could do to remedy this, as it seems it's just the cycle of how things are going.
The one thing that discord lacks is a good sense of moderation. I've been to so many servers run by corrupt and toxic people. Discord is a breeding ground for those sorts of things and good servers are rare to find, at least in my personal experiences. The one thing forums have over discord for me is that they are much more chill and people are much more appealing to be around.
The forums started declining all the way back in 2013-2014, as seen by the yearly post count in the Java Survival Mode section (this used to be the most active "discussion" forum, as opposed to forums like modding or servers):
Note that this was BEFORE Twitch bought the forums - a decline of 97% between 2012 and 2017, with a slight rebound in 2014, but otherwise activity has been falling by around 50% year-over-year (it is hard to say what the current trend is from looking at archived pages since posts have been deleted but also restored; Survival Mode gained 163,000 posts over the past 6 months, many of which are likely older posts which were undeleted. A quick look at recently active threads suggests around 10 per day, so relatively speaking, Twitch didn't really do much to the forums, more so in absolute terms).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Well that's tragic. Years of minecraft history just lost because someone didn't have the foresight to create a system that could be reversible.
Do you think the posts could be restored one day or is it just gone forever because it's just too much work.
Even if there was a technical method of mass-restoring posts, the original authors of the various posts would still need to accept the GDPR acknowledgement before the posts would be restored. Maybe some of the information is cached by the Internet Archive and is still available to people who specifically search for it.
- sunperp
The problem with that is that you would have to have the link of the deleted post to access the archived page lol. A lot of old mods are already extremely obscure that require a lot of digging to find; finding the forum thread would be even harder.
That is quite true. The question I have is why is this forum declining? Is there a clean cut decision that is responsible or is it just some sort of thing that comes with an aging forum?
A number of things including but not limited to the forum changing ownership multiple times, MC getting less popular, people unable to login to their old acc, broken links, mass deletion of threads but in my opinion, it's the decline of the forum format. How many forums are still active in this day and age. I guess people don't like digging through threads and sections to find the newest and most relevant content.
Source? The first reply on this thread completely contradicts this widespread idea that Minecraft is dying (at the end of the post) - which IMO is all down to personal dissatisfaction with the game (loss of personal or friends interest, having a favorite server shut down, and so on) - the overall number of players/sales has tripled since the forums really started going downhill (after 2014, when around 60 million copies had been sold, now it is 180 million).
The same also goes for the idea that the game has been "revived" recently - which is only true if you look at certain areas, like its popularity on YouTube (Minecraft had around 100 billion views last year, far more than any other game - but this was also the case the year before, prior to the "revival", and during an all-time post-2013 low according to Google search trends - the main metric used to claim that the game is dying - maybe it is just because everybody has heard of it by now, and the game now has a built-in recipe book so you don't need to search as much).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Well, I was thinking more along the lines of looking at the archived forum at a point in time prior to the mass-deletion. For example, here is the archived suggestions forum section prior to the GDPR deletion. You can compare the pinned threads at the top with the current suggestion section to see that it has threads pinned that are no longer available.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170614112055/http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions
current:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/suggestions
You could probably just go out to an older archive of the mods section and find the older mods that were GDPR-deleted.
- sunperp