I find it odd that in your experience your members want "modern *features*", so much so that they leave if they can't be found. In my own personal experience, members on my board couldn't care less about *features* even when they are announced and demonstrated. In fact, most don't even know that there are more forums beyond the one or two they infrequently visit.

I used to 'hack' my board adding what I thought were great new *features* but it soon became apparent that the majority didn't even read the announcements of the new added *features*. Only a handful even use a different "theme/style".

What I think is that the social networking aspect of the Internet has changed dramatically over the past 5-7 years. The "lemmings" have run after Facebook, Twitter, etc. to satisfy some 'personal need' and BB type sites have fallen on hard times because of it. How to attract people back to BBs is the question, I guess. Perhaps *features* will work for those who are on your board, but they won't mean a thing to mine.

Is it worth it for you to wait to see if UBBThreads will get an update in the very near future? Only you can decide that. Admittedly, 'brand loyalty' only goes so far even for the most dedicated customer/user. Hopefully, things are going to come to fruition here and start to move forward. UBBThreads has been tossed to the wolves several times but managed to survive. Time will tell whether it is going to allow to die or be resurrected with a renewed interest on the part of both owner(s) and customers.

We would like mobile functionality & the shared facebook/google login but aren't really being hit by social media - if anything we use it to direct traffic to our forums. If a forum is just chat, even if around a specific subject social media is likely to win even if you can match them feature for feature. I'd say that accounts for a lot of forum. The forums that do well are more niche & need structures that FB etc can't match.

Problem is with forums being so hard hit the takeup is reducing & therefore the income stream of the providers which means less to pay developers. With FB doing the business for most people I can't see things getting better for most forum providers.

I think the future will see products like this being more niche & maybe more work for independent 3rd party fan developers being commissioned to do mods & add features as required by forum owners on a pay as you go basis. These new features may feed back to the community for a cost or even be added to new releases in lieu of support credits or somesuch.

(not a UBB user but in a similar position)

We're all seeing a decline in active membership and it's very easy to blame the forum software for it. However, it's also happening on communities running the latest and greatest forum software with all the "bells and whistles." So it isn't the software.

The reality is that forums in general have lost popularity and have a negative perception. I believe this can be partly contributed to the Bowling Alone syndrome but more largely due to how the media has portrayed forum users and moderators. Talk to young people now about forums and you'll find most have a low opinion of forums and the people that hang out on them. For example, many think we're all Comic Book Guy and live in our mother's basement or are power hungry small people that will fly off the handle if a post is made to the wrong forum. These perceptions have made forums uncool and more importantly, gave people a perception that forums are unwelcoming places full of rude "know it alls" who are more focused on making themselves feel important than actually helping someone else.

Google also seems to be penalizing forums in search and favoring blogs over them. I suspect it's because blogs are typically more Google ad heavy and are also higher converting. In addition, forum users suffer more from ad blindness and aren't as likely to click ads/links. So yet, another reason for Google to penalize us.

While it certainly wouldn't hurt for us to have features like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc sign-ins and more social media features, having them will not bring you a flood of new users or entice your inactive users to become more active again. The only thing that has a chance is making sure your community doesn't contribute to this negative perception or cloud hanging over forums. In other words, foster a welcoming and friendly community and promote the fact that it's frequented by your target audiences' peers. Get rid of troll and agressive/argumentative members immediately. Get rid of moderators that care more about the rules than helping people. Don't warn or flog anyone in public for breaking rules and deal with it in private instead. Emphasize all the positive aspects of your community on your landing pages and maybe you'll be able to overcome the perceptions forums have been burdened with.

The traffic to forums has been on the increase, not general forums but forms of specific topics etc. Single faiths are growing general faith are dropping.

Back when this started, and I was headed over to another package, before being told about a upgrade ( a few years ago) we had some suggestions, and most of them were traffic builders. IE Having an email address that would post to a certain forum the email, another package has that for an option, that would be great for me to capture news from news.google.com and have it post with some proper filters, and there were a bunch of other suggestions to help forums to grow, there seemed to be more of an effort on the admin sections, the geek-lovers-land of forum.

I enjoy and live on parts of Facebook, but there traffic, according to one study about 2 weeks ago, has dropped 4+% since the new year, that is one of the reasons why forums are climbing..

I do a weekly email, which helps to maintain visitors..

an example is this in Sept 2010 23 had 29 his of traffic for the month
this month we have had 185 gigs of traffic... over 6 times the amount.

I'm still getting over 300 new registrations each month, plus all of the registrations that the SFS mod bounces.

I think we are taking this off-topic, though.

I believe features and modernization are important as, at the very least, we need to keep up with progressions in technology and the popular devices being used to communicate. I agree that we can't blame our software for a decline in user activity but software that does not keep up eventually will be a factor.

One thing still remains constant regarding websites in general and that is content. This especially holds true with communities like forums. If there is nothing worth returning for visitors are not going to return plain and simple. Any decent website requires constant work and fresh content. Even a niche site requires work.

I also view social media as a way to attract traffic to your website or community. Facebook for example allows you to create a page for just about anything. I created one for mine and after a little work I am gaining followers that have brought new traffic to my website. All social media such as Facebook or Twitter can be used to your advantage to attract attention and traffic, but again, if there is nothing for them once they find your website or community then it's all pretty pointless.

And hey, maybe the delay in releasing a new version is actually going to be the surprise release of version 8, a new UBB website... and...

You can't blame the software. I have been running a trucking related website for about 8 years now and about 6 months ago I dumped all the forums and based it strictly on information only. Why? In the year prior to the change I had zero posts made on it. I saw former, good posters, appearing on FB and posting what they used to post on the forums. That pretty much sealed it's fate as a message site. I think a lot of what caused it's downfall was the proliferation of smart phones and tablets. Neither software I used worked on them, so people migrated to what they could do with what they had on hand. I know of a couple of people whose forums are flourishing, but they are servicing a niche market that sites like FB can not, at this point, service. Personally, I think the regular message forum is going to have to become more like FB, Google +, etc if it's to survive.

As you can see, the above was posted 15 days short of six months ago. That is a half a year ago.

If there isn't another update soon, there will soon be hardly any customers left using the UBB forum software.

Mr UBBTHREADS

Can you at least make some kind of statement?