Never disappear the Member Comments or Forum!

[13hm13]

I'm new here.
I noticed the SimilarWeb rating of WhatHifi Forum to be be above 300K, and the main WhatHF site is above 5 million. That's very good. That means WHF is getting plenty to traffic. SimilarWeb allows one to compare traffic of various websites and Forums.
E.g. Stereophile.com is currently just below 500K, and is slowly sinking.
One reason for that is that stereophile.com decided to delete (disappear !!) their internal Forum (20 years of member comments and conversations LOST, with only some records at Arcive.org) . And, only recently, the FINAL BLOW: stereophile.com deleted all below-article feedback Comments. Jim Austin just didn't pause Comments; he got rid of all EVIDENCE:

Comments Retired, Letters Welcome: We’re All Ears | Stereophile.com

Dear readers, Thank you for being an engaged part of the Stereophile community. We have retired the in-page commenting feature on our website, but we still want to hear from you. Please email your thoughts, questions, and system notes to: STletters@stereophile.com Selected letters will continue...

www.stereophile.com

So many of us who left our FREE scholarship there are quite upset. The MQA debate, years ago, was multiple pages of user Comments. Very good discussions. All gone!
Stereophile is part of AVTech Media, who make the final decisions. And that includes site like HF News and HF Choice.
Sites and media corps that go this route are on their way out, and the corporate officers are calling the shots and cashing their stocks while the prices are high.
Don't let this happen at What Hi-Fi.

 

[R2D2]

I'm new here.
I noticed the SimilarWeb rating of WhatHifi Forum to be be above 300K, and the main WhatHF site is above 5 million. That's very good. That means WHF is getting plenty to traffic. SimilarWeb allows one to compare traffic of various websites and Forums.
E.g. Stereophile.com is currently just below 500K, and is slowly sinking.
One reason for that is that stereophile.com decided to delete (disappear !!) their internal Forum (20 years of member comments and conversations LOST, with only some records at Arcive.org) . And, only recently, the FINAL BLOW: stereophile.com deleted all below-article feedback Comments. Jim Austin just didn't pause Comments; he got rid of all EVIDENCE:

Comments Retired, Letters Welcome: We’re All Ears | Stereophile.com

Dear readers, Thank you for being an engaged part of the Stereophile community. We have retired the in-page commenting feature on our website, but we still want to hear from you. Please email your thoughts, questions, and system notes to: STletters@stereophile.com Selected letters will continue...

www.stereophile.com

So many of us who left our FREE scholarship there are quite upset. The MQA debate, years ago, was multiple pages of user Comments. Very good discussions. All gone!
Stereophile is part of AVTech Media, who make the final decisions. And that includes site like HF News and HF Choice.
Sites and media corps that go this route are on their way out, and the corporate officers are calling the shots and cashing their stocks while the prices are high.
Don't let this happen at What Hi-Fi.

It did happen, now they are back again…

 

[13hm13]

It did happen, now they are back again…

Are you saying WHF's Forum and/or Comment features were deliberately shut down? If so, why?

 

[R2D2]

Are you saying WHF's Forum and/or Comment features were deliberately shut down? If so, why?

Yes, that’s what I am saying. I don’t know why or why they come back, perhaps you know the answer with your theory? 🤔

 

[13hm13]

Yes, that’s what I am saying. I don’t know why or why they come back, perhaps you know the answer with your theory? 🤔

Why are you beating around the bush and playing trolling games with a newbie, That's weird. Perhaps a Mod or Admin can elucidate.
Thx in advance.

 

[R2D2]

Why are you beating around the bush and playing trolling games with a newbie, That's weird. Perhaps a Mod or Admin can elucidate.
Thx in advance.

I am not beating around the bush or playing trolling games, I simply answered your questions and posed a question myself. Good luck getting a response from a Mod or Admin…

 

[nopiano]

Are you saying WHF's Forum and/or Comment features were deliberately shut down? If so, why?

It changed ownership. It was previously a Haymarket publication based in Teddingtom, adjacent to the film studios. Then it moved to Future Publishing. I can’t recall the exact timing, but around then the original forum was closed and not accessible. The premises moved a few times and are now in Bath I believe.

We were led to believe the forum was history, but it reopened a few years later. I’d guess the gap was 3 or 4 years if not more. Older posts were reinstated though some I know - basically mine! - sometimes were a bit scrambled in sequence, yet essentially intact.

That’s also why some of us oldies have preposterously huge numbers next to our post history. I was probably up to ten thousand previously but can’t honestly remember.

Welcome to the madness! 😉

 

[13hm13]

We were led to believe the forumwas history, but it reopened a few years later. I’d guess the gap was 3 or 4 years if not more. Older posts were reinstated though some I know - basically mine! - sometimes were a bit scrambled in sequence, yet essentially intact.

Jesus Christ, bro! This is not re-assuring.
I use forums as tablets and diaries. And I HATE losing content. It's like a hard drive crash w/o back up.
Even the old Yahoo and Usenet forums are permanently gone. And they were once the backbone of the internet.
Thru Archive.org, I was able to retrieve some of my Stereophile content, and move it to (a) my own HDD storage and (b) Reddit account.
I figure if Reddit ever vanishes, the Nukes have been dropped, the Solar flare has come or the asteroid has impacted.

 

[nopiano]

Jesus Christ, bro! This is not re-assuring.
I use forums as tablets and diaries. And I HATE losing content. It's like a hard drive crash w/o back up.
Even the old Yahoo and Usenet forums are permanently gone. And they were once the backbone of the internet.
Thru Archive.org, I was able to retrieve some of my Stereophile content, and move it to (a) my own HDD storage and (b) Reddit account.
I figure if Reddit ever vanishes, the Nukes have been dropped, the Solar flare has come or the asteroid has impacted.

What I didn’t add above was this. When this place closed I then moved to the WigWam forum, along with quite a few ex-WHF contributors. The great advance at the ‘Wam’ was personal messaging. Quite soon I’d met a few Wammers, then at their annual shows.

Unfortunately, the Wam then went pear-shaped too because the actual owner couldn’t make any money from it, and because the platform had to change. The IT support was onerous apparently, and it was bombarded with spam, bots etc. Eventually, a coterie of members launched a rival, named after a recently deceased member’s call sign. Hence Maverick is now mostly ex-Wammers.

Gladly, I’ve maintained friendships, and many are also on PFM, or pink fish media.

The Wam inherited the closed Linn Forum, a case where the manufacturer couldn’t devote the resources to maintenance. That archive has gone too. It was a great resource, though Linn themselves keep an excellent Wiki called Linn Docs.

Facebook groups can be good, but they’re hard to search and end up mostly repetitive. All take effort to regulate and moderate.

Bit of a muddle all round!

 

[13hm13]

Gladly, I’ve maintained friendships, and many are also on PFM, or pink fish media.

I've been on pfm since 2007. Gotta say, not very impressed with much of that community. And owner/admin "Tony" is a weirdo. YMMV!
That said, PFM has respectable SimilarWeb metrics. It's a little better than WHF at the moment.

SimilarWeb :

Similarweb - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"Similarweb ranks websites and apps based on traffic and engagement metrics."

The older Alexa ranker, which was a MAJOR PLAYER, unfortunately went belly up in 2022:

Alexa Internet - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Anyway, I use these web-ranking engines to gauge a website or forum's "cred". If the site/forum gets a lot of traffic, chances are you'll get good feedback, and maybe the site will be around for a while. MAYBE!

Unfortunately, a lot of cult-like sites, like ASR and AudioKarma, have very high Alexa/Similarweb ranks. And also high Google PageRanks. It's like feedback loop. Inside the echo-chamber, filter bubble. So not much maturity in such in-bred prisons.

The SW metrics change month by month, so you can track how well the site is doing over a period of a few months. SW is mostly for pros and many of its features and metrics are for subscribers only. But from the free site, one can assess ...

Audio Science Review (ASR) has Similar Web Monthly Visits 1.6M
AVforums has: Monthly Visits 1.7M
WHF has: Monthly Visits 273.3K
AudioKarma has: Monthly Visits 844.3K

Reddit has: Monthly Visits 4.1B

Hence my earlier comment about Reddit being the safe bet to park your content.

 

[nopiano]

Audio Science Review (ASR) has Similar Web Monthly Visits 1.6M
AVforums has: Monthly Visits 1.7M
WHF has: Monthly Visits 273.3K
AudioKarma has: Monthly Visits 844.3K

Wow! So ASR has 6x the visits of WHF? And it isn’t even monetised. Well, Amir is going to sell speakers, but apart from that…