Canonrumors has shut down the forum

www.canonrumors.com/changes-at-canon-rumors-no-more-forum-or-facebook/

no explanation given. They're not even selling it. Legal issues?..

Money and the cost of administrating a Forum.

Nobody cares anymore about what the latest upcoming little tweak to a companies cameras.

Hmm.. If the cost were the main reason, the owner would've probably have attempted to sell the forum before shutting it down.

Cost is certainly a factor. For example 'DPRevived' which was started independently when DPR was shutting down, or had done so, has said recently that they would have to shut down soon without further funds. There, sponsorship is still voluntary and members have indeed responded, some quite well!

There's now the second article that says the money was the main reason www.canonrumors.com/more-information-about-the-closure-of-the-forum/
Still a bit puzzling why he didn't want to even attempt to sell it: "We have no interest in selling either the forum or the Facebook page." Facebook page will probably be worthless, but the forum is a bit different thing. Maybe the legal costs associated with the prospective sale are higher than the cost of the forum.

Anyway, in the end there's now one photography forum less.

Two data points on this Dear John post struck me as being interesting beyond the specific case

A music site I followed for its Jazz reviews, went behind a paywall, citing a drastic fall in traffic due to AI. I found this difficult to understand, but it seems to be a real problem.

The Forum model seems to be in trouble. DPR the photography giant seems a lot less busy too. How and where are people interacting on the web?

(Original Photo from DPR.)

Indeed.
It's a total rolling shambles.
But, finally, the cone of silence has been lifted.
Now, that Giant Portrait ModeTelly confirms the future of DPR.
It's ONLY going to be Mobile Phone based.
(I was going to cleverly insert it into the 2001 A Space Odyssey crater scene,
but really, why bother ?)
They've been obfuscating all along. The cams are only for show.
There is no future there for Cameras, or Desktops.
No one can say we didn't see it coming, so sad, but.

I suspect RonP's account is stuck on mobile mode, and yours isn't detecting that you are on mobile...

I doubt they would be silly enough to alienate desktop viewers with mobile view only.

I was really puzzled about the statement that AI is having a profound effect on content websites. That is until this past Thursday when I was on a conference call at work because the public website was having issues. On the call it was mentioned that traffic is down 20 percent from a similar period a year ago. This was attributed to AI. The person talking about it explained that people using search will just read the AI presented summary and not follow through with a visit to the website. If your website needs visits to drive revenue, losing 20 percent of your traffic can certainly be a problem. Even if they don't click through on site ads, the price you can ask for those ads can be affected if your traffic is down. In a way, AI has come for website revenue sources just as Craig's list did to newspaper classified ads. If it becomes destabilizing enough more and more sites might put up a paywall as a course of action as the music site did. I'm glad there are enough people willing to contribute to keep this site going. It looks like this, or something like it, will be the way on the road ahead.

Thanks, I imagined it was something like that, but could not fathom out exactly why.

In do not think the Paywall solution is the answer. I went to that music site for just one monthly column, that dealt with Jazz in a magazine that is 99% Pop/Rock. Spending €60 for a subscription was not on. I already pay for a couple of newspapers.

These "AI" answers are not so science fiction as we are led to believe. I was researching some places for my Romanesque project, and the AI summery just reproduced stuff word for word, that I had already read in a tourist brochure. It all seems a big IP theft. I would hazard to say that those pictures we can build with AI are just lots bits of stolen pictures, scraped from our posts on Blogs and forums like this.

I the photo world. I believe gear has come to a point where improvements are small. Also phone cameras are pretty good and I use my phone for genera photography these days. I see even sites like DPR have much less traffic, as nobody is really interested in the latest camera gear anymore.

Hi B,
No such luck. Have a good look at that photo I posted.
That is the Engine Room, all they breathe, look at, plan for and work with, is Portrait.

R.

I no longer post questions on DPR's Tech Forum, or here for that matter because of having to filter through rebuttals from un-knowledgable people or "having" to respond to trolls.

Instead, I ask Google AI which knows everything as far as I can see ...

If others do that, I guess traffic will fall.

Indeed. I may seem to be more pro-AI than people here might like but I don't use Generative AI. Tried it once with a pathetic result.

Long ago, was going to post a picture of my sold Praktica MTL 3 and lazily asked AI to draw me one:

AI at left; real at right