I’ve been publishing news, reviews, and all sorts of information at Liliputing for a little over two years. In that time, you’ve been an important part of the conversation. Users have left tens of thousands of comments with their thoughts, suggestions, corrections, and more. Without Liliputing’s awesome readers, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do.

To build on this momentum, I created a forum for Liliputing users in late 2008, allowing you to start your own discussions and talk about topics that I didn’t bring up first. But a while back the site was hacked and I traced the problem to the forums, which made it a bit too easy for users to upload their own code.

As a solution I moved the forums to Ning, a service that lets anyone set up their own social network, forum, and user community. But Ning is shutting down its free service soon. I don’t make any money on the forums hosted with Ning, but more importantly, looking at the statistics for the site, there are very few active members of the Liliputing community on Ning. While Liliputing receives over a million page views each month, the forums get just a few thousand hits, averaging just 37 unique visitors per day.

We definitely lost some members when we made the switch from a self-hosted forum to a Ning community. But ultimately, I think there are some other forums out there that are offering much more value for netbook users, including:

And so I’ve decided to just let the Liliputing Forums disappear. When Ning pulls the plugs on free sites soon, Liliputing will fade off with a number of other communities. On the one hand, this should be a lesson about signing up for free services — you tend to get what you pay for. On the other hand, I just never had the time and energy to build the Liliputing Forums into the kind of site that could rival Liliputing’s main web site as a resource for news, information, and discussion about low cost ultraportable computers.

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9 replies on “Letting the Liliputing Forums fade into that good night”

  1. Honestly, it’s for the best. I tried joining and answering some questions but I got spammed and ended up in only non-productive conversations, so I cancelled. I will keep reading the articles though!

  2. Thanks for the mention!

    Actually when I read about the Ning free closure my first thought was of the Liliputing forum, it’s the only time I’ve seen Ning in use!

    Keep up the good work, Liliputing is certainly my first source of info on the wider ultra portable market 🙂

  3. Forums are tough these days, the only active ones are either over clockers or about specific products or brands like the active forums you pointed to.

    On a brighter note, now that you don’t have to moderate your forum anymore what are you going to do with all that free time? 😛 More reviews I hope! Or Maybe attend the Netbook Summit? 😛

  4. Sad, but I think the right thing to do. Only a few of us used the forums and from time to time you could tell some weird user was on there trying to sell something or link to something.

    Even without the forums I will still visit the site every day. I come for the news, so as along as I can comment on the news that should be good enough.

    1. I agree. While at first it was a cool feature, the activity on there died down. You have a great news site here, I think it is fine to let it be just a news site. It works well as such, and the comments on here are active and entertaining. Keep doing what you’re doing Brad!

      1. I come here for the news more than the discussion. Same thing w/ jkkmobile & umpcportal. I’ll be visit just as much as before.

        Good Job keeping up the popular part; news. This is a great site.

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