Just like many things in life, the Internet is full of fads and fashions. There have been stacks of them in the past, and no doubt there’ll be stacks more. At the moment, the current fads are Social Networking, Blogging and “Web 2.0″. A few years back, the Internet was completely bombarded with forums. They were everywhere, open for discussion about anything from software and development through to what people were doing on the weekend. Yes, I even created my own! It was a game development forum, designed for discussion of all things related to game development and the challenges faced in the engineering of games. It was great fun, and after a few months of “marketing”, I actually had a groovey little community posting regularly and having some very interesting discussions.

For reasons that are beyond the scope of this post, I decided to hand my community over to my co-founder and move onto other things. It was at this point I took a very long break from reading and posting on forums, mainly because I was getting sick of answering the same questions over and over again. Such is the nature of forums, you’re always going to attract some idiots, and there’s only so many times you can listen to someone say “I’ve figured out how to print out a string to the screen, can you please tell me how to make Quake 6?”.

Until recently, the only time I’d checked out a forum since then is during my search for snippets of information with regards to new technology, software fixes, development information or other similar bits and pieces. I didn’t really feel the need to contribute the communities that I was perusing - but I did start wondering whether or not active forum communities are still a huge part of the web.

Now, that may seem like an obvious question since I have already stated that I’ve grabbed a lot of information from them, but I’d like to know what percentage of the ‘Net population actually uses them or contributes to them? In the time I’ve been a web user, I’ve seen a lot of people get sick of forums, and have moved away (possibly never to return) and I’m wondering if they’ll continue on the way they are. The first generation of forum users seem to have moved onto blogging, and forums are now full of the next generation of Interweb users searching for information without intuition telling them to use Google.

FYI, I’ve just started posting/helping out at the Kirupa forums, and I get the feeling that I’ll get sick of it quickly for the same reasons I got sick of it back in the early 2000s I think on the whole I prefer writing blogs, posting comments on blogs, and writing how-tos or tutorials on what I figure is interesting stuff. Is there much of a difference between that and forum posting? I think there is

So what do you think? Are you, or were you, a forum user? Will they be completely superseded by blogs, or will they continue to keep their litlte part of the ‘Net just for themselves?