Are the forum site becoming irrelevant?

[ecampbell]

Are the forum sites like this one becoming irrelevant? Due to the presence of mass answering site with quality control facility like Quora. What do guys think?

[batman]

No they are not. Sites like Quora focus on each and every niche which makes vulnerable for a place for people to use for marketing purposes.

Which in the case of a forum it is not. They focus only on a specific niche so experts share their opinions freely which is an advantage.

[sharmaroshni]

Depends on what you, and they, mean by online forums.

If they mean email lists - they’re as strong as ever.

If they mean web-based forums, they’ve never really worked all that well – people tend not to like logging into multiple sites to check for & respond to postings - too many sites, too much work - even with notifications.

And… social media has somewhat taken over that role.

[avinash]

No, absolutely not. People always need forums. All answers in any field can get told in sites like Quora.

[steveposter]

Forum sites are still popular and can compare with answer sites and quora because there are still more people appreciates what forums can provide for the needs of the users.

[RH-Calvin]

Forums are helpful to build traffic from signature links. They are helpful to build do follow and no follow backlinks that are helpful to redirect traffic to your website from various forum threads.

[ksmith29]

Forum sites are the oldest type of sites in the internet. Many trends such social networking, mass questioning sites etc comes and goes but the forum communities still exist.