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Urban webzine SmartShanghai has closed down its online forum.
After five odd years of heated discussions and raging debates, it was determined that the SmartShanghai Forum did indeed address and solve all the world’s problems, and it was decided that its purpose as a bastion of free speech and intelligent discourse was no longer required. So we’re taking a break from it for a bit, waiting for the world to get completely awful once again, and then we’ll relaunch it and enable all the SmSh’ers to once again shed a little insight on pressings issues of the day, thereby setting things right again.
The front page also runs an article by DJ SexyPaul on the forum closure. In the article "Not with a bang" we are supplied with a number of all-time forum statistics, including this telling snapshot:
Top 10 Boards by Replies
"Word association game": 10,752 replies
"Prediction game" : 2,133 replies
"A tribute to the Asian beauty": 1,873 replies
"Asian Beauty Part 3" : 1,159 replies
"Funny picture thread" : 774 replies
"What Song are you listening to right this second?" : 766replies
However, neither the article or the announcement seem to give any kind of concrete reason as to why they have shut down the forum. SmartShanghai has matured into a well designed Web 2.0 site and perhaps the old style ex-pat forum is not a good match anymore. DJ SexyPaul sums things up:
Personas loosely based on real people were formed soon thereafter, and these personas logged in day after day to taunt, goad, insult, threaten, intimidate, bully, and, very rarely, to inform or compliment each other.
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I really liked reading their forum. It was a dynamic source of nightife info mixed with off the wall commentary and the usual online jabs. I can understand why they would close off the forum though, as it can be a real bear to manage with trolls and regulars fighting to post jabs at eachother and all. (I think Shanghaiist is seeing some of the issues recently in its comments sections as well) But mostly I did enjoy the same 20 people ribbing each other a lot, happens on any forum community though. (Paul summed it up nicely) :)
Its been put in ice before...lets see what happens next. In the meantime, SmartShanghai is still a great source of nightlife and entertainment info!
I suddenly find myself with an extra half hour of free time per day.
i think they should have kep the nightlife section though, so people could discuss the event the day after...