Solved! What happened to the official Gigabyte forum?

[Puffnstuff]

I went to log in last night and it was gone with this message "It looks like this forum doesn't exist any more. The forum admin has opted to remove it from the ProBoards service. If you want, you can go ahead and create your own free forum with ProBoards! ". Went to the main Gigabyte site and used their link and got the same message. Any idea about what happened to them?

 

[intender]

I was the head moderator at that forum. Gigabyte decided to abandon the forum and deleted it. They had not been involved with the forum for a few years, but they still owned the forum, and owned the domain. I am considering starting a new forum on my own, but I am not sure it would be worth the trouble since most of the information we had was lost when the forum was deleted. I am not sure it would ever bring in enough traffic to justify the effort. There are several other resources already available like here and tweaktown.

 

[igor_kavinski]

They must really be in trouble if they don't have the resources to maintain a forum for their users.

 

[Tech Junky]

This has been happening all over the place. It's not just one company doing this sort of abandonment of forums.

Where the need for a forum is going or making it less desirable for companies to keep hosting them is different depending on the topic / traffic. The issue seems to be revenue based off the traffic they produce or just not interested in managing them or potential liability issues if they're not properly moderated actively.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Still poor state of affairs if they don't even have techies in-house passionate about their own tech products.

 

[intender]

This has been happening all over the place. It's not just one company doing this sort of abandonment of forums.

Where the need for a forum is going or making it less desirable for companies to keep hosting them is different depending on the topic / traffic. The issue seems to be revenue based off the traffic they produce or just not interested in managing them or potential liability issues if they're not properly moderated actively.

This is very true. Most forums are slowly going the way of the dodo. We had a reasonable amount of traffic and moderation wasn't an issue. I think in the end forums just don't have the same metrics that companies want to see to justify spending money. Discord, Reddit, Facebook...All free, and they can show off that they have 100k members even though maybe only 20 are active. Domains cost money, forums get mostly guests who easily find the answers to their problems archived somewhere in the forum and move on without posting or joining. Somewhere like reddit is designed to make it hard to find old comments, and to get you to post a new question every time which looks better for metrics. On forums you don't get a constant flow of new members and casual conversation like you would on any of the other platforms. That said, other than their costs for the domain I believe they had no money going out from the forums. I could be wrong though, I don't know what they had going on. Proboards is free unless you have a custom domain, disable ads or sign up for some of their features. I did all the maintenance, fixed all the bugs, updated it for new hardware, mod team kept up with everything else. It couldnt have been any cheaper for them unless they dropped the custom domain and went with something completely free. I attempted to get them to transfer ownership of the forum and I could have put it under my own domain. Proboards has a process in place for doing that. Even if the forum died the information would have stayed online. There was a wealth of information from the community that is completely gone.

 

[Tech Junky]

Yup. I had a forum I took a liking to that covered lesser known brands of devices that dove deep into specific things in addition to the normal day to day fluff devices. Back in Jan they shut it down for reasons unknown and moved on.

TechnologyGuide

Thank you for visiting the TechnologyGuide network. Unfortunately, these forums are no longer active. We extend a heartfelt thank you to the entire community for their steadfast support—it is really you, our readers, that drove

www.techtarget.com

Now they send traffic to reddit / LTT / TH. I refuse to deal with reddit. LTT is a bit gimmicky and not interested in the sales pitch. TH is useful for some things but, not really their forum function.

I joined a few different sites and took them for a test drive for a couple of weeks and find AT to be active enough to keep me around but also SNB is fun to mess with the Asus diehards and debunk their love affair with the company's products. So, after joiing a handful of replacement options I'm stuck with 2 for the time being.

It just seems forums as you noted are more of a repository of info than active participation for companies tied to them. There's always a cost whether time or money depending on what's needed but, if it's moderated by people not on payroll it's cheaper but, there's still the hosting costs. Maybe there's a change in leadership in the CO's behind them that lead to their demise. I think the issue with NBR was they sold their assets and in the process killed off anything that wasn't core to tech target.

 

[DeathReborn]

Looks like the UK forum is still running, it's pretty much a skeleton (if that) of what the US one was. Thankfully I kept copies of the pages (and files) about my only current Gigabyte board (GA-Z87X-OC) so if anything happens to that rock of a board I have local info on my server.

I do think that archiving the forum and allowing it to be backed up on the Internet Archive or similar would have been better than taking the nuclear option.

 

[CropDuster]

It sucks that so many forums are dying out due to social media. The signal to noise ratio makes it difficult to find worthwhile info nowadays. Lots of good tutorials across many forums were screwed when photobucket pulled their shenanigans too which I'm sure didn't help things.

 

[MAW1082]

It's probably also related to ownership and maintenance. If you're hosting a third party service with an in house database, someone has to pay for the domain, pay for the infrastructure, pay for the internet access, patch it, etc.

You get a bunch of people whose bonus doesn't align with post-purchase users discussing things and boom, it's gone. Hopefully, they'll come to their senses.

 

[GrumpyMan]

A lot of people aren't building their own machines either anymore which is why those forums gained in popularity in their day.

 

[UsandThem]

Were their servers powered by PCs with Gigabyte power supplies?

Too soon?

Tech forums (and main pages) are either slowly dying or being consolidated. Just look at he lack of new content on our main site. I would not be surprised in the least if Future shuts down Anandtech at some point, and focuses their resources towards other sites they own (like PC Gamer and Tom's Hardware).

The new content at those sites over the last several years has been dramatically higher. And with people like Ian leaving, it does give one cause for concern.

 

[bigboxes]

It sucks that so many forums are dying out due to social media. The signal to noise ratio makes it difficult to find worthwhile info nowadays. Lots of good tutorials across many forums were screwed when photobucket pulled their shenanigans too which I'm sure didn't help things.

Shenanigans? It's a private site. They can do whatever they want. Pay them if you want them to host them. That's your option. I used Photobucket a lot. Much of my online pics were no longer hosted. I was a site admin on a defunct site myself. I had lots of tutorials pretty much ruined. But I didn't want to pay. I wanted to get hosting for free. I use another service now, but not like I did back in the day.

 

[bigboxes]

Was their servers powered by PCs with Gigabyte power supplies?

Too soon?

Tech forums (and main pages) are either slowly dying or being consolidated. Just look at he lack of new content on our main site. I would not be surprised in the least if Future shuts down Anandtech at some point, and focuses their resources towards other sites they own (like PC Gamer and Tom's Hardware).

The new content at those sites over the last several years has been dramatically higher. And with people like Ian leaving, it does give one cause for concern.

I have openly been saying the same thing. How did TH get above AT in the food chain? Never would have guessed it.

 

[UsandThem]

I have openly been saying the same thing. How did TH get above AT in the food chain? Never would have guessed it.

My guess would be it's likely because their articles (for the most part) are a lot less technical compared to Anandtech.

And if the article takes more than 5 minutes to read, I imagine that many younger viewers would rather just turn on some tech site's YouTube channel.

After they acquired all of the various sites from Purch, the new owners likely weren't sure how a "deep dive" website like Anandtech would translate into more viewers. My guess is Future likely saw better traffic at the other sites they acquired, and decided to focus on those instead.

When Anandtech stopped doing GPU reviews while the other sites continued to offer them on a pretty regular basis, I began being a little concerned how our site fit into their future plans. Hopefully I am wrong and things will once again pick up here again with more articles/reviews, but I guess time will tell.

 

[CropDuster]

Shenanigans? It's a private site. They can do whatever they want. Pay them if you want them to host them. That's your option. I used Photobucket a lot. Much of my online pics were no longer hosted. I was a site admin on a defunct site myself. I had lots of tutorials pretty much ruined. But I didn't want to pay. I wanted to get hosting for free. I use another service now, but not like I did back in the day.

Didn't say they couldn't. Keeping already hosted content would've been a nice gesture as many cases the people that had posted the content I'm referring to were long gone but their information lived on. Instead PB pissed off pretty much the entire internet. Cest la vie

 

[bigboxes]

Didn't say they couldn't. Keeping already hosted content would've been a nice gesture as many cases the people that had posted the content I'm referring to were long gone but their information lived on. Instead PB pissed off pretty much the entire internet. Cest la vie

I remember moving from image shack to photo bucket when image shack decided to start charging themselves. I apologize if I seemed a little harsh. I forgot that photo bucket made it very expensive for people that had previously been getting it for free. I moved from Photobucket to imgur. We all know that MJ is not the greatest at times, but free is free.

 

[mastertech01]

Pretty sad when you can buy a 900.00 motherboard and they abandon support forums. It wasnt much but it was something.

 

[mastertech01]

I remember moving from image shack to photo bucket when image shack decided to start charging themselves. I apologize if I seemed a little harsh. I forgot that photo bucket made it very expensive for people that had previously been getting it for free. I moved from Photobucket to imgur. We all know that MJ is not the greatest at times, but free is free.

I had Photobucket and it was so full of malware and hackers and virus that I had to move to Imageshack. Honestly, 2.00 per month isnt a deal breaker for me. Some vending machines get almost that for a soft drink.

 

[tcsenter]

Unless doing ecommerce or paying for the forum software (e.g. vBulletin or other), domains and hosting are pretty affordable. Impose file upload and photo size limits. What's $400 ~ $500 per year for a company the size of Gigabyte North America? Throw your mods a few bones like refurbed or surplus products, leftover company T-shirts or caps adds another $500. Minus a little ad revenue? Pffft!

 

[igor_kavinski]

Must be some jerk in finance/accounting. We used to have an end of month office party. It was a tradition going on for years. Then a newly hired kiss ass told the MD that they could save about $3000 a year. Company annual profit was like around $2.5 million. You can guess what the MD did.

 

[DrMrLordX]

There should still be some pretty active Gigabyte threads over on overclock.net .

 

[Puffnstuff]

It would appear that my gigabyte aorus master x570 is going the way of that forum for today out of the blue different pcie based card started acting weird, lost sound and my top monitor output then various software started not working all the while no changes were being made by myself. Just to be sure I switched over to my laptop and sure enough keyboard and monitors behave as they should.

Normally when I boot up the desktop the optical output on the sound card will activate my speakers but even that stopped working so I had to manually switch over to them using the sound utility. My razer synapse no longer comes up nor does the evga sound console and there are no corrupt system files.

Several times I shut it down and it failed to post so I switch to the backup bios and even it was sluggish so I reflashed it but none of the problems after post changed. I'm so torn as I don't want to spend any more money on am4 but I already have a 5950x and 32gb ddr4 so moving to alderlake would cost me over $1k just for the mb, cpu and ddr5 and I don't know if my evga closed loop aio would work on that socket. BB has an Asus crosshair viii hero in stock and the good boards are drying up fast or are starting to be way overpriced. I love Asus but that only has 2 m.2 slots on it which is how I ended up with the gigabyte in the first place and the master is now around $500 on amazon.

I'm so tempted to just go all in on Intel and sell the cpu and ram to go against it.

 

[igor_kavinski]

It would appear that my gigabyte aorus master x570 is going the way of that forum for today out of the blue different pcie based card started acting weird, lost sound and my top monitor output then various software started not working all the while no changes were being made by myself.

Are you sure that your PSU is not the one acting up? Brand/model of PSU?

 

[Puffnstuff]

I'm fairly certain the chipset is failing based upon the boards behavior. My PSU is a EVGA Supernova G3 1300W monster so power is not an issue. My new MSI MEG X570S ACE MAX arrives tomorrow so I'll do the swap Saturday after I service the transfer case in my SUV.