Forum dying off?

yeah, we've really missed you GKAM. 

No, road.cc is not dead or dying - in fact it's bigger now than it's ever been.
A lot bigger actually - we're currently expanding or editorial and video teams. 
Websites, the internet, social media and the way we access them and interact them are constantly changing – I love the forum so am keen to keep it as vibrant as possible, but commenting has moved on the site more towards stories and the live blog in particular, and off site on FB and Twitter - where people have the added benefit of being able to comment without the bother of RTFA. 

One final thing GKAM… that thing you always seem to be going on about, reviews and reviewers being paid by the companies to write them – change the  record please. It's a lazy assertion and it's fairly obviously not true and anyone who thought about it for for more than a moment or two would realise that. I've been a bike journo for coming up to 24 years in all that time I can count on the fingers of one finger the number of writers of all those I've met and worked with from across the world I thought was bent and he wrote for an overseas outlet long defunct. Every tech journo I've known - colleagues and rivals – always sets out to do an honest job with their reviews. Fair enough the quality of some reviews is hampered by a lack of talent or the constraints of the format – mag reviews have to condense a lot of information in to a limited space so if you're then repurposing them to the web they can looks a bit thin, but in my experience none of their faults were down to a lack of honesty by the reviewer. More practically, if a company is paying you to write about something then you have to label that as sponsored content – them's the rules.  Websites tend to be pretty hot at sticking to that – although you can certainly find places on the web that stretch the rules on declaring sponsorship, even then it's often more less about deceiving the audience and more about not being penalised by an algorithm.  
 

@  GKAM84  I'm more a reader than a poster,and there must be a few more like me.It's a shame, as there's some very knowledgeable folk on here.I am going to make an effort to post more,as this placehas helped me loads over the years.The reviews are very good and honest,unlike some of the magazines and comic.

Lets hope a few more start to write

The reality is that forums have been dying off for a while, it isn't just this one. 

I used to have an entire folder in my bookmarks list that was just the different forums I contributed to. These days, just one ... for a mobile game I don't seem to be able to stop playing ... but even then I only occasionally visit and rarely contribute. 

The stuff that forums used to do seems to have been overtaken by Facebook and Twitter primarily, because all of your interests can be catered for with one or two sites/logins, rather than 30 different logins on 30 different sites, making the whole experience a lot more efficient. 

The newer layout somehow reduced the immediacy of posting, if that makes any sense? I can't quantify exactly how it works, a bit like you just prefer one thing over another sometimes? The think they way threads are laid out now made a difference.

Road.cc don't help themselves as we all know they recycle their own articles relentlessly and if you've commented on it the first time round, how much more can you add to it the second time other than taking the piss about it being posted (AGAIN)?

I think a forum can also be 'too nice'. Echo chambers may seem great but it's boring to just hear the same viewpoints, even if you hold that view point. Surely everyone likes a bit of argument? Not saying the place needs some 'kill all cyclists' types to post but I do think some of you think cyclists are the saints of the road, when clearly sometimes they are also the same people driving Audis like twats and treat the road as theirs no matter what they are using.

I really hope that it thrives, as it has been useful and interesting. I'm currently on a week's holiday and riding some routes that were suggested in the forum. I've got mechanical questions which I'll post after I'm home. I'll surely have other things to say and ask and I hope the community is around for those.

Perhaps like many, this site is one I read almost daily. The reviews are the best I've found, the news is there, and the comments are usually thoughtful. If the forum is a bit quiet, perhaps that's a reflection of the news team getting more of the day's issues into the blog or main stories.

perhaps we've reached the point where there's nothing new to say.

not even this.

I was only thinking myself a few weeks ago that the forum had died, it seems like a few questions, a few answers and no banter. Most of the articles are also reruns of old pieces or new articles about how a motorist nearly killed someone on a bike. Sad demise for what was once a good site. 

I could never work out how to navigate it properly, it's not particularly intuitive. I suppose the owners would be more happy us posting on news articles anyway, there's no money from forums