The many websites I used to enjoy like forums are vanishing and are not all being archived. This is a pity, especially if the forums had various solutions on them that another forum does not have, then the information is lost forever. But this is the evolution of the Internet. The sharing of information is moving to platforms like Discord where the information is only accessible via a login and can not be easily viewed in the Google search results. At least platforms like Reddit allow the posts to be viewed without a login, this means you can find them in search results making them actually accessible. Another annoying thing is that images are sometimes shared via Tinypic and they expire, so you get placeholder images instead. That is aggravating if you really needed to see a certain screenshot to get the solution to a problem and it is not viewable anymore. or if you do find a forum posting promising the solution and it is not there. Instead, you see I PMed you the fix, thread closed. This is the most annoying thing ever, or if you need a certain file to patch a program, and you get this: [You must register an account to view links]. That is not always the best idea. Apart from the loss of forums, many websites have vanished as well. The Atomic Maximum Power Computing forums that used to be here: http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/ have vanished and taken a lot of information with them.
But in the old days of the Internet, there was no Reddit and Discord, all we had was forums to ask questions and Ask Slashdot. Now there are plenty of communities to share information and ask tech support questions, but it is not the same. A few tech magazines have died as well, the all-consuming Internet is taking over from traditional publishing. But that might not be all bad. I used to get good British Linux magazines in the newsagent and by the time I got them, they were out of date. Probably better to get information about new Linux distributions on the Internet instead. The only downside to hosting forums on the web nowadays is the massive amount of spam and spambots. But that is why we have spam blocking measures on the Internet to curb this as if you leave your website unprotected, it will be overrun with spam in no time. And that leaves a bad impression on the visitors to the website. And they might not come back at all. So ensure when starting a new website with forums that you have active administrators and good anti-spam solutions, not generic ReCaptcha, something unique that will help block bot spam postings that can overwhelm a site. But it would be great if when forums shut down, they have a way to archive the posts so that others can make use of them after the site is gone. That would be appreciated. But this is not always possible. That is a shame.