Original DPR has migrated to XenForo

Removal of the titles has killed a huge amount of knowledge.

It is already interesting unfortunate to note many of the experienced and knowledgeable have stopped posting in m43. There is a recent thread with some weird stuff which would have previously been debunked by many but now the unwashed are in the majority they automatically think they are correct. It didn't take long...

Gear Patrol probably wont receive too much brand damage as their customers and the DPR Illuminati are from completely different demographics. And the forums will probably putter along until GP realise they aren't receiving enough click throughs and referrals to their main site at which time the curtain will probably be pulled... Weirdness...

Hopefully, they keep the original database archived, from the old system, to allow future retrofits of historic data. It is probably not that big, as far as these things go. When we had the threat of total shutdown of these forums in early 2023, we were told that we could download out posting history as a JSON file, and I started thinking that after about 24,000 posts, it was going to be a huge file, and it turned out to be only 12 megabytes! A million people like me would be only about 12 TBs, less than the largest consumer hard disks available. What takes up the most data is clearly the images; not the text.

Isn't it strange that there isn't a larger uproar about this, web-wide, so to speak? I mean the destruction of the old forum content. When Amazon was closing down a scream could be heard all over the web, it must be saved! Now when it has been destroyed and is more or less useless I don't hear so many upset voices. Or do I just visit the wrong places?

Over it, is probably the right term, hence the lack of noise. The backbone of the place is moving on. Do it to me once, etc
The destruction of the threads via killed titles may have been on purpose, but was most likely overlooked and accidental.
Now there is little point in looking at, or researching through mangled posts.
It's a crime given the body of work put in by some really valuable posters. (24k ? We hear you John.)
Either way, the drop off in posts is a fairly good barometer I reckon.
They were warned to death, but still went ahead, so good luck with that, team.

I can only speak about my own experience and given that I have VERY niche interests, that doesn't account for much... but I almost certainly stumbled upon the dpreview forum through some old posts, which came up during one of my searches for some old lens I was interested in. And the people making nuanced posts (only really visible through threaded view, because lens-specific topics were connected through that for the most part) convinced me to join, learn and contribute as well.

I have no idea how traffic really looks like (the "views" numbers they show are certainly completely wrong, in terms of real use by humans at least, otherwise the number of responses would make absolutely no sense), but overall I don't think that this forum is going to end, it's too big for that. But I feel like it's going to be more shallow and significantly less important as an archive for information. That might be fine for most people, sure... but I'm personally sad about it.

No, as mentioned above... the vast majority doesn't care at all, I think! The main traffic doesn't come from nuanced stuff. But to me the people responsible for it are the backbone of any site or forum.

Hi,

That is an interesting point regarding reviews. Used to be they were in the forums as threads. Later, they had their own home.

What I notice is, for example in the Kodak SLR forum, the review threads we moved from the Pro Digital Talk forum once we had a Kodak specifc one - they are still all in the Kodak SLR forum where we moved them to (from Pro Digital Talk).

Yet the other member discussion threads we moved at that time, well, they are in the Pro Digital Talk forum now.

Maybe the review threads had a flag bit set differently.... I don't really know, but something caused the change over to treat those threads differently.

I didn't go looking in any other brand forums to see if that same thing happened or not. It doesn't really matter now as the change is done and no one really wants to dig into such stuff. All old data. Pay it no mind. Say. Where have I heard that before? ;)

Stan

Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer

The OLD threads are destroyed, not the whole forum. It isn't only the loss of titles, but the threads are impossible to follow since you don't know what other post a post is in reply to. Try any longer thread and you'll see. If I google anything photography related I'm bound to get at least couple of hits at DPR forums, but getting something sensible out of longer discussion threads as they look now is next to impossible and very confusing and time consuming. That's why some of us think the old forum should rather have been archived, so it still would have been readable.

The web community cared when Amazon was going to erase it. That was my point.

As a personal matter, the original closing announcement of DPR just broke me. Thus, I think this second insult just didn't have the impact of the first. I was a fairly active participant there, but after the announcement and rush to find a new home for the Sunday Cat! (thanks to all who make this possible here!) I have since not interacted in the way that I used to with either site.

Asked ChatGPT about threaded view in XenForo:

What’s the default in XenForo?

posted FWIW

xpatUSA (Ted Cousins)

Last commercial forum solution to keep threaded view for threads was vBulletin 3, and this is only because it took them forever to develop and ship v4 which dropped it. The story is turbulent one but at the time people really preferred flat discussion and threaded mode was annoying when most of forum threads didn't get over two-three pages of content (which was 99% of forum content on most of forums).

I saw somebody earlier mention that writing threaded discussion is easy one, just keep ID of parent post on reply post. It really is this simple, but only if you put in place a limit of thread size. I suspect this is the reason for DPReview software to limiting size of threads on their site. Because if you have constraints on thread size, you can just load posts tree into memory and do slicing ops there, render UI and be on your merry way. But if you don't want to limit thread's size, now you need to roll in some tree splitting algorithm to keep everything manageable or site will just run out of memory.

All the talk about losing threaded view hasn't discussed the viewing options in threaded view. DPR had the hard link variety with a largish tree view and the message at the bottom. Other views may have a smaller tree view with more scope to see other subsequent messages with read ahead (This can possibly satisfy those that prefer flat view so they can read down through posts - and it is possibly the best overall option as posts are still listed in thread order but the requirement to click and wait for a page load is bypassed).
The Threaded View option I like the most is the collapsible / expandable view so sub threads one is not interested in can be kept collapsed and interesting threads expanded. Anyone who used to view Usenet and some older email clients used this methodology and it was to me by far the most efficient method.

There is another option for large threads to save all posts loading into memory - it is called Virtual Tree View and only records / posts in the viewer are loaded into memory. I was using it a long time ago for when the user interface to a data store needed windowed controls - ms windows used to run out of graphic resources quite quickly. I believe Virtual Tree View has been maintained and will work across a network connection.

With reference to my ill-fated poll and regarding the population size I went back on line and entered a sample size of 10, 7 out 10 nays, 95% confidence level:

pop 4000 site members, margin of error +/- 28.37%

pop 40 on-line on average, margin of error +/- 24.91%

posted FWIW - probably not much.

xpatUSA (Ted Cousins)

Where does it show that, Alan? Oops, just seen it, duh!

One started Oct 20, 2025 in the Sigma Forum has accumulated 494,000 Views ... also seems a lot ...

xpatUSA (Ted Cousins)

It is clearly being inflated somehow.

An m43 thread started just 6 days ago now has 589K views.

Some creative accounting going on there somewhere...