Forums Forums Thread Like Summary - WikiWirral usage.

I may be wrong but traffic to this site seems to be fast approaching zero. This is a pity as I believe the site has value.

If I'm right, what can be done to improve things? Suggestions please.

Hi all,

Its been a strange old game keeping the forums alive, which I do intend to keep doing.

Back in the day, let me give a short open timeline of how things change and some of the decisions along the way.

We started many years ago November 2003. Back then our forums we funded by our back pockets.

We grew so fast, we out grew our hosting company, again and again, and the only option available to us was to host our own forums on a dedicated server. This was a big jump in costs and back then there wasn't a Google Ads only sponsors of our site which i think we done ok as we managed to break even.

The dedicated server was expensive back then at that point we needed to make Wikiwirral a business as it was far to expensive to self fund and any revenue via sponsors or advertising required a business account to keep it above board, it was the natural progression we needed to do to continue to grow.

If I remember it was about then we rebranded to WikiWirral from CruiseWirral.
That was because CruiseWirral was dying fast as it was only about motor cars. So we put Cruise Wirral inside Wikiwirral.
Wirral History was also created about the same time. The traffic came back with a great bunch of contributors to Wikiwirral and Wirral History.

We had made decision early on to host as many pictures on our own server and not link to them where ever we could. And that old chestnut, pictures amounts to server space, which amounts to increased bandwidth, which mean more money again, for the world to see our images and link to them, from motor cars to Wirral History and back then a massive Jokes forum.

So about this time we were flying in respect to having good server resources and bandwidth and costs now eventually being covered. And then things started to change ?

Google started to introduce "Family Safe" advertising, which meant we had to restrict access to certain forums or Google Ads stops payments due to "infringements" This happened twice almost back to back which stopped all income from ads for about two months. Which was a big deal. With bills to pay it was touch and go.

If I remember the Jokes forum was public and now it had to become restricted to prevent google indexing us and causing a new infringement. And then we would get more notices of infringements in other forums and that is really why some forums are not open unless you are a member.

Then we started to see Facebook and similar pages showing up with pretty much all of our History forum pictures and stories being copied directly word for word with links to our images on our History forums and similar. The decision was made to put the History forum images behind a paywall (Subscription) to protect the content and original works by those members that had put so much time effort and research in to the topics and its contents.

So we used to be able to balance the books from Google Ads, but that was halved pretty much over night due to the new restrictions, and Google has continued to turn the screw on acceptable content over the years which has killed our advertising income. The subscriptions helped to balance things for a time, but that also has dwindled from days gone by. Now Google Ads has announce that unless a page with an Ads on it fully loads you wont get any revenue! That's new but I know its going to be another kick in the gut for any revenue for us, as it always ends up being a decline, and nope we don't get any revenue from Robots or Spiders scraping our forums for content.

Over those years we have then needed to down size our severs as our popularity decreased. That has not been an easy feat as we were fat and heavy with a massive database with over a million posts and a huge amount of online storage space. This restricted our options massively but we always wanted all the content from days of old to be available always to our members.

As others have correctly mentioned the rise of social media platforms the ease of opening an app and finding content quickly was now so easy to do. Web forums are a dying bread, but we have kept us alive for 23 years, and we do intend to keep going for as long as its humanly possible to do so.

Another factor along the way is life, there was a time when i had a lot more time available, but not so much over the last few years, I am active in the background, answering emails assisting with enquiries, maintaining our server and keeping us up to date.

Some decisions may not appear fair at face value but behind the scenes the likes of Google push us in directions we don't always want to go, but were forced to, and then work with what we have. Server moves we do ourselves with are pretty intense, that keeps our overheads within reach.

It has been a journey, which i fully intend to keep going.

And everyone who has registered and contributed along the way we can not thank you enough, we have all been apart of our amazing journey. With out you we would not be who we are today, so thank you for your contributions.

We are 23 years going on to 24 years old, we still have plenty of fight in us yet.

Through WikiWirral we have had Births, Deaths, Marriages, Birthday and Calibrations across those 23 amazing years. I'm proud of it and so should you be too.

I do wish things could be different but for the Ying, we need to the Yang, and somewhere there is always a price tag.

Rest assured were not going anywhere 25 years is just around the corner for us.

Thank you very much for all your support.

Best regards Mark

Forums like this have suffered because of the likes of Facebook, X and Instagram, gladly I subscribe to non of them.

I believe the demise of this forum started when subscription charges started to view the many photographs voluntary posted by members for other members to view.

If everyone could view the photo's, it just might encourage discussion.