GUYS GUYS!! LOOK !! LOOK!! [2]

Eldorion wrote:

Forest Shepherd wrote:I just passed mine about two weeks ago! Whaddayaknow?

Congrats Forest. Four years milestones are a fun one for me; you've now been on Forumshire longer than a Presidential term or Olympiad.

Congrats also to Blue, who I notice has also recently passed this milestone.

Wut.. Time were did you go, indeed. At least I wasn't paying attention for the anniversary or those words would ring hollow

Eldorion wrote:

Forest Shepherd wrote:I just passed mine about two weeks ago! Whaddayaknow?

Congrats Forest. Four years milestones are a fun one for me; you've now been on Forumshire longer than a Presidential term or Olympiad.

Congrats also to Blue, who I notice has also recently passed this milestone.

It's odd, I drop in and out of the forum with random periods of heavy/sparse activity and still haven't paid much attention to some of the recurring jokes/history some of the old members have, I still feel like a bit of newbie at times then I remind myself I've actually been a member here longer than Blue and Forrest, maybe I just post too much nonsense.

The years have flown by...

Just ignore my musings, I'll continue to have my quarter-life crisis quietly in the corner...(though I'm not entirely sure I'd like to live to 100 the way this world is going...)

Eldorion wrote:Congrats, malick! I'm very glad to have had you here with us for so long. {{{Especially when you ask questions about my forum statistics project. }}}

Yeah, how is that project going?

You may have to add an appendix in the wake of that recent TV announcement...

I know you've mentioned the feeling like a newbie thing before Malick but I hope you know that I at least have considered you to be an integral part of this community for several years now and always enjoy seeing your posts. Though I completely understand the cyclical activity thing; I do something similar.

malickfan wrote:Yeah, how is that project going?

You may have to add an appendix in the wake of that recent TV announcement...

I've gotten about not taking measurements of forum activity every couple weeks but I've been checking back in. It's looking like the year-end top four will probably be the same as they were at the mid-year point, though the gap between AUC and TRN will not be very large. I have been wondering a bit about where to go from here. At the end of 2015 I did a bit of extra retrospective stuff about the end of the Hobbit era (including the final home video releases), but it does sorta feel like we're now at the end of a more broadly defined Jackson era as a whole. Or it might be more accurate to say that era had already ended bur we're just now seeing what the next phase of Tolkien fandom will look like.

I was already questioning how much longer the statistics project would be viable given the lowering levels of activity; I suppose that might not be as much of an issue now, depending on how things play out. I did rejoin the Tolkien Society Facebook group recently though after seeing Troels Forchhammer mention that he felt social media had finally eclipsed forums in the same way that forums had once eclipsed Usent (paraphrasing here). This process has been going on for a long time and he's not the first person I saw who said that but I do think that in the past year or two a certain threshold was crossed and forums no longer hold quite the position of prominence they once did. Not that forums were ever the only places to discuss Tolkien online, but if you wanted communities dedicated to the topic (which tend to attract more serious posters, especially as a percentage of the overall userbase) I think forums were the best destination since they surpassed Usenet in c. 2000 until very recently.

Of course, that's not to say that forums are now dead and everyone should move on. I am curious to see if there will be any new forums dedicated to the TV series that crop up. I used to be somewhat surprised in the past that there were not more Hobbit-specific movie forums that had been formed. Actually that sorta ties in to the other thing that's been on my mind, which is that we are (as of today) exactly one month away from the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the Hobbit film project, which was also the date that the first Hobbit movie-specific forum opened its doors (Old Forumshire wasn't founded until about a year later though). That feels like it might deserve a retrospective of sorts but I'm not sure what exactly I'd say. It's a little sad that we're the only ones left. Very few other HMFs ever got off the ground, and the last notable surviving Hobbit forum other than us closed its doors in March 2016. They were one of the forums founded in December 2007, but this means that Forumshire has now existed for longer than any other forum in our class, and on December 10 we will become the first (and last) Hobbit era forum to reach the nine year mark.

Hopefully that wasn't too much in answer to your question but, well, you know me well enough by now.

I think I've mentioned my phrase New Wave of Hobbit Movie Forums (NWOHMF) before but anyway just to be clear that category does not include TORn, which is a LOTR-era site that (very successfully) rebranded as a Hobbit site in the mid to late 2000s. They were of course the largest forum for most of the Hobbit era, but they've been around since 1999, although their forums were rebooted along with the site as a whole in '07.

There are obviously still plenty of forums that exist in the wider Internet, including fairly young ones, so I think that the shifts in Tolkien fandom are probably more due to the fact that we haven't had anything new for a while, though fundamental changes in peoples' Internet behavior plays a role too. But I lurk on various other forums and even still actively post on one in particular that is still insanely active, so I think the possibility of a forum revival and/or a new "wave" of Middle-earth TV forums exists. Hopefully I'll be along for the whole ride, but I don't see myself getting quite as active as I used to (then again, "how I used to be" meant averaging more than 5000 posts a year for eight years across here, Bree, TORn, and the Plaza, so I'm leaving myself a lot of leeway ).

we are (as of today) exactly one month away from the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the Hobbit film project, which was also the date that the first Hobbit movie-specific forum opened its doors (Old Forumshire wasn't founded until about a year later though)

What was the first Hobbit movie forum?

I have read your replies Eldo, interesting stuff as always, and I will respond with a longer answer when my brain feels like waking up again...

halfwise wrote:What was the first Hobbit movie forum?

First ever Hobbit movie forum was, to the best of my knowledge, the small board attached to the official blog, which was launched on the same day the project was announced.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071219113745/http://community.thehobbitsite.com:80/

First fan-run forum was the one attached to a German-English Hobbit blog which had been around since 2001. The forum was started a day after the project was announced. This is the one that closed in March 2016, and is the only HMF other than us and Bree to (barely) break the 10K post barrier.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071221143523/http://forum.thehobbit-movie.com:80/

Both of those links take you to the earliest versions of each forum recorded by the Wayback Machine but you can use the thing at the top of the page to see more recent versions of each forum up until their closures.

malickfan wrote:I have read your replies Eldo, interesting stuff as always, and I will respond with a longer answer when my brain feels like waking up again...

Thanks Malick! It's always fun to know when people read and find my stuff interesting and you always have thought-provoking comments and questions.

halfwise wrote:

we are (as of today) exactly one month away from the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the Hobbit film project, which was also the date that the first Hobbit movie-specific forum opened its doors (Old Forumshire wasn't founded until about a year later though)

What was the first Hobbit movie forum?

Wasn't it 'Bree'? I posted occasionally there around 2010-2012(?) and I think that was how I got to know Figgs and a couple of others a little bit.

I think there's a couple of Tolkien themed usenet groups still active, dating back to the mid 1990's.

Ah, I see theHobbit-movie also had a non-hobbit section. I thought we pioneered that, but praps not.

I'm very doubtful there's enough hype for the upcoming TV series to spawn any new tie in forums*, as Eldo has pointed out Tolkien forums have been dying a slow death for several years, as have forums in general it seems.


*Though I'm wondering if the recent spike in traffic at other Tolkien forums will be reflected here, will we continue to retain 2nd place?

If it's any good there will be new forums. Look at Game of Thrones.

halfwise wrote:Look at Game of Thrones.

I still haven't watched it, bought Season 1 but just can't be arsed to give it a go...

Eldorion wrote:I know you've mentioned the feeling like a newbie thing before Malick but I hope you know that I at least have considered you to be an integral part of this community for several years now and always enjoy seeing your posts. Though I completely understand the cyclical activity thing; I do something similar.

Maybe I'm just in denial about how old I am, recent events in personal life (or perhaps more accurately things I'm attempting to change) have put things in perspective, hard to believe I'm 26 next year (though my receeding hairline seems to think I'm nearer 46 ). But I've certainly enjoyed my time here, and I plan to stick around as long as I can, though my joining of the forum conicided with a gradual cooling of my hardcore Tolkien geekness (my attempt at leading a readthrough of The Hobbit didn't get very far did it? perhaps I'll try to put some notes together for another chapter or two soon...)

but it does sorta feel like we're now at the end of a more broadly defined Jackson era as a whole.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing...it's certainly the end of an era though

I was already questioning how much longer the statistics project would be viable given the lowering levels of activity; I suppose that might not be as much of an issue now, depending on how things play out. I did rejoin the Tolkien Society Facebook group recently though after seeing Troels Forchhammer mention that he felt social media had finally eclipsed forums in the same way that forums had once eclipsed Usent (paraphrasing here). This process has been going on for a long time and he's not the first person I saw who said that but I do think that in the past year or two a certain threshold was crossed and forums no longer hold quite the position of prominence they once did. Not that forums were ever the only places to discuss Tolkien online, but if you wanted communities dedicated to the topic (which tend to attract more serious posters, especially as a percentage of the overall userbase) I think forums were the best destination since they surpassed Usenet in c. 2000 until very recently.

I think there's a couple of the old usenet groups still active.

I'd agree with Forchhammer-social media such as facebook twitter etc is this generations version of forums for online interaction, geared towards a younger generation with new computers, programming and different attention spans, perhaps important to note online social interaction these days is so much more fast moving and expansive than it was when LOTR films were first announced (look at TORn-the current forum is 10 years old and some have criticized the coding/format to be a bit archaic (which is perhaps true in some respects even for 2007) but it's still much more advanced than the original TORn forum (or at least, the archived bits you can read) that it soon becomes outdated, those forums that have weathered the storm were started by and aimed at hardcore fans and I think there will always be a place for those groups (I'm a semi-regular poster at another
equally small niche forum)

I used to be somewhat surprised in the past that there were not more Hobbit-specific movie forums that had been formed.

I'm assuming people went and saw the first film, then lost any enthusisam for the idea...

(Old Forumshire wasn't founded until about a year later though).

Does any of that still exist?

It's a little sad that we're the only ones left.

Yeah...but dosen't it make you feel proud Mr ex-moderator

the last notable surviving Hobbit forum other than us closed its doors in March 2016.

Which one was that?

Hopefully that wasn't too much in answer to your question but, well, you know me well enough by now.

Indeed I do...well, I know your online persona rather well by this point...I'm not even sure if I know your real surname...

Ah, the weird anonymity of the internet...

malickfan wrote:Wasn't it 'Bree'? I posted occasionally there around 2010-2012(?) and I think that was how I got to know Figgs and a couple of others a little bit.

I think there's a couple of Tolkien themed usenet groups still active, dating back to the mid 1990's.

The original forum at the-hobbit-movie.com (what we usually call the Old Forum, though I referred to it as "Old Forumshire" above*) was founded on 10 December 2008. It was taken offline on 11 February 2011 when Taz attempted to merge it with the forums at Planet-Tolkien.com. That move failed because the entire active userbase of Forumshire jumped ship and moved to this forum, which I set up that weekend. Since the merger failed, Taz set up a new forum at the-hobbit-movie.com on 1 May, which became known as Bree at some point in or after October 2011, when I "discovered" that there was a new burgeoning community on the site and posted links between the sites on both forums. Petty and Orwell became regulars on Bree (and I believe it was Odo/Orwell who came up with the name by analogy to Forumshire, a term he coined prior to Dark Planet Day) and Petty especially was responsible for a lot of people from Bree joining Forumshire.

This process accelerated in December 2011 when the Facebook Connect system that 99% of Bree-landers used to set up their accounts broke. I found a workaround to the problem after a couple days and this later became the default login method, but a number of people who joined here ultimately stuck around. Incidentally, this is why most people who posted on Bree  have been known by both their real names and invented usernames over the year. The majority of people in 2011 used their real names (via their Facebook accounts) and only adopted screen names later.

*I should also note that there is some confusion in terminology because eventually some people began referring to the old forum as Bree because it was located at the same URL as the later forum. However, there is no continuity between the two forums. While some people who posted on the Old Forum did eventually become active on Bree, none did so initially, and the Bree community was its own original thing.

halfwise wrote:Ah, I see theHobbit-movie also had a non-hobbit section.  I thought we pioneered that, but praps not.

Almost every Tolkien forum (and forums in general) has an off-topic section. Bree was one of the few exceptions because it didn't have sub-forums at all.

malickfan wrote:I'm very doubtful there's enough hype for the upcoming TV series to spawn any new tie in forums*, as Eldo has pointed out Tolkien forums have been dying a slow death for several years, as have forums in general it seems.

There has definitely been a general decline among forums. I think that it's sometimes overstated insofar as a majority of Internet users never posted on web forums. There may have been a majority of Internet users on Usenet in the '80s but I think that stopped being true after the Internet became widely available through commercial services (ie, open to people unaffiliated with either Universities, tech companies, defense contractors, and the military). However, as the number of Internet users skyrocketed in the past couple decades, the percentage of all Internet users on forum decreased. Of course, there have also been people who left forums for social media and/or Reddit (which is sorta-kinda a forum farm), but this is also part of the natural life cycle of Internet communities which has been studied since at least the late 1990s (see especially page 11:13 in the PDF linked below).

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.484.5895&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Though I'm wondering if the recent spike in traffic at other Tolkien forums will be reflected here, will we continue to retain 2nd place?

We're currently at the #4 spot for the year and Hall of Fire has put a bit more distance between them and us so we will probably stay at #4, though who knows what impact the TV series announcement will have. We've seen more activity in response to that than they have thus far, but still nowhere near enough to erase the deficit at this point.

Well I say man the trebuchets - we can at least claw our way up to #3 I think if Petty maintains his output. How far behind Hall of Fire are we?

Eldorion wrote:We're currently at the #4 spot for the year and Hall of Fire has put a bit more distance between them and us so we will probably stay at #4, though who knows what impact the TV series announcement will have. We've seen more activity in response to that than they have thus far, but still nowhere near enough to erase the deficit at this point.

If there's one thing I won't settle for it's 4th place.

I'm leading the post count this week and month. doing my bit avoiding exam-grading.

I just wish I had more to talk about. I'm a man of few words.

malickfan wrote:Maybe I'm just in denial about how old I am, recent events in personal life (or perhaps more accurately things I'm attempting to change) have put things in perspective, hard to believe I'm 26 next year (though my receeding hairline seems to think I'm nearer 46   ). But I've certainly enjoyed my time here, and I plan to stick around as long as I can, though my joining of the forum conicided with a gradual cooling of my hardcore Tolkien geekness (my attempt at leading a readthrough of The Hobbit didn't get very far did it?   perhaps I'll try to put some notes together for another chapter or two soon...)

I'm certainly glad that you're still around. I sometimes forget that I'm less than three years younger than you but I think that's probably because I was so used to being the youngest person in the room in any given social context for so long. People still tend to assume that I'm about four years older than I really am but I sometimes have trouble thinking of myself as an adult.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing...it's certainly the end of an era though

I spent a lot of time reflecting on it in the year or so before the release of BOFA so I'd more or less come to terms with the inevitability of it by the time everything wrapped up. Going to the theatrical release of BOFA-EE in late 2015 was a bit of an emotional experience though. My own period of greatest activity on Tolkien forums synced up pretty closely with a broad definition of the Hobbit era and my time as admin here synced up almost exactly with the period in which there was new Hobbit material being released (started two months before the first production diary and stepped down two months after the last EE made it out on DVD). I'm glad that I'm still here now and I sometimes have to fight the urge to try to get more involved again, but I like having more time for other hobbies these days. I am genuinely excited to see what happens with the series, but I think it's for the best to just be along for the ride (though I keep making obscenely long posts like these).

I think there's a couple of the old usenet groups still active.

The two main newsgroups were alt.fan.tolkien (founded sometime in or before 1992) and rec.arts.books.tolkien (founded 1993) and both still exist, but they've both been on life support for years. No offense to anyone who is or was a member of the groups.

I'd agree with Forchhammer-social media such as facebook twitter etc is this generations version of forums for online interaction, geared towards a younger generation with new computers, programming and different attention spans, perhaps important to note online social interaction these days is so much more fast moving and expansive than it was when LOTR films were first announced (look at TORn-the current forum is 10 years old and some have criticized the coding/format to be a bit archaic (which is perhaps true in some respects even for 2007) but it's still much more advanced than the original TORn forum (or at least, the archived bits you can read) that it soon becomes outdated, those forums that have weathered the storm were started by and aimed at hardcore fans and I think there will always be a place for those groups (I'm a semi-regular poster at another
equally small niche forum)

Yeah, this is definitely true. I find TORn's setup to be rather charming because I have a weird nostalgia for late '90s/early '00s web design even though I wasn't active online at that point (mostly due to my age). But it was out-of-date even in 2007, yeah. To be fair, phpBB3 (the software we use here) is about ten years old now itself and out-of-date in some ways compared to newer software like XenForo, but I think it still gets the job. Though I'm pretty attached to it so I'm not exactly objective here.

I'm assuming people went and saw the first film, then lost any enthusisam for the idea...

The cool reception that The Hobbit received definitely didn't help though I was surprised that AUJ opened as low it did compared to ROTK. Perhaps testament to a lot of people just not being as interested in TH as in LOTR (and readers who were especially TH fans were, I think, less likely to be avid PJ fans), but also perhaps just that LOTR's zeitgeist-y moment had passed. Though who knows, there could be another one in the future. The 2000s were after all LOTR's second time in the spotlight, after the 1960s, and it's hardly gone away at any point.

Does any of that still exist?

The Wayback Machine captured a fair amount of the Old Forum at various points; if you put in the URL you'll see pages of the Old Forum from before DPD and pages from Bree after its foundation. Six of the nine sub-forums of the original site were imported to Planet Tolkien and those threads can be found in their forums, specifically The Hobbit (Movie); The Lord of the Rings (Book); The Silmarillion (Book); The Author, and Introduce yourself (the only reason I know this is because I made a note of it at the time on the stopgap forum which I just checked). However, these threads are mixed in with PT-original threads from both before and after DPD, and many of the threads have been bumped at various points over the page almost six years, so it takes a bit of sifting through to find old ones. We manually copied over close to 1500 posts from PT onto this forum back in 2011, which can be seen by searching the threads made by the two accounts that were used in that process (all links below).

https://web.archive.org/web/20110124231701/the-hobbit-movie.com/forum
https://www.planet-tolkien.com/board/
http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/u7
http://www.hobbitmovieforum.com/u8

Yeah...but dosen't it make you feel proud Mr ex-moderator  

I would be lying if I tried to deny that having re-founded and run this forum for five years, including the release of all three Hobbit movies, gave me a certain feeling of pride and accomplishment.

Which one was that?

https://web.archive.org/web/20071221143523/http://forum.thehobbit-movie.com:80/

Indeed I do...well, I know your online persona rather well by this point...I'm not even sure if I know your real surname...

Ah, the weird anonymity of the internet...

My real name is Jacob Keener and it's been publicly associated with this username (primarily via my blogs and previously Twitter) since 2009.

halfwise wrote:Well I say man the trebuchets - we can at least claw our way up to #3 I think if Petty maintains his output.  How far behind Hall of Fire are we?

Here's the most recent measurement (counting from approximately midnight on 4 January):

Code:

as of 2 Nov 2017 (very early AM; 302 days)

01. A-U.com: 14727 (48.8 ppd)
02. TORn: 12484 (41.3 ppd)
03. Hall of Fire: 9570 (31.7 ppd)
04. Forumshire: 8009 (26.5 ppd)
05. TORC: 3816 (12.6 ppd)
06. Barrow-downs: 3164 (10.5 ppd) (???)
07. LOTR Plaza: 2937 (9.7 ppd)
08. board77: 1984 (6.6 ppd)

The question marks after the Barrow-downs are because it saw a suspicious jump between June and September, roughly doubling its ppd rate for the year, but I haven't gotten around to investigating if that was legit yet. There have similar instances in the past; sometimes they turned out to be true and other times they seemed not to be. The 'Downs has been around for a long time though and I don't think they're the kind of forum that would deliberately fake their post numbers.

bungobaggins wrote:I just wish I had more to talk about. I'm a man of few words.

Hard as it may be to believe in a thread like this, I generally don't feel the urge to post as much as I used to. That's changed somewhat in light of the TV series announcement but who knows how long it will last. I have, in any event, always tried to resist the urge to spam either to inflate my own post count or the forum's own numbers. I want any achievements we (or I) achieve to be legit, and in my experience on various forums the most active individual posters are usually not the ones who make lots of spammy one-liners.

NB not trying to imply that anyone here is advocating that we become spammers; just sharing my perspective as someone who has been measuring forum activity levels for almost five years.

I just want to say that at the Forumshire moot in NYC we used our forum names, if I remember correctly. Or perhaps we avoided names altogether.

You guys had a meet up in NYC?

We're only about 1600 posts and 5 post per day behind Hall of Fire!  If we up our rate by 25% and they don't we've got them.

What's "A-U.com"?   Shall have to go take a peek.

Simulpost with Bungo: Yeah, Eldo was coming up for a Tolkien conference, we pulled Radagast down from Yonkers and we met in a bar then walked the HighLine. Not sure where we posted the pictures, it was over a year ago.