Digital Spy

I don't think that's an excuse for them to let racism run rampant on there though!

I stopped reading digitalspy a couple of years ago; it reads like its written by 15 year olds. I have to assume that's now their audience. Clickbait headlines are enough to get me to desert any website.

POP TOPIC: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.

F**k right off with that crap.

Excuse my irate.

It's when they claim they know "all you need to know" about the iPhone 8 days after the iPhone 7 is announced that it feels like they're sh***ing out articles for the sake of it.

Every article reads as forced. A lot of them have very little substance.

The writing in these articles is utterly dreadful - and it passes off as clickbait garbage. Digital Spy is a far cry from the site it once was. Once the focus shifted to showbiz I was instantly put off completely.

The success of the Big Brother sub-site during the Neil Wilkes era certainly gave DS a taste for the showbiz/reality content, enough for Hearst to buy them out.

Question is are enough visitors actually reading the poor copy or going straight to the forums for their daily dose of ill-informed chat?

Digital Spy used to be a semi-decent website back in the day. It's a tremendous shame to see it go the way it has, and the way it's going to go.

I remember about 11 years ago (I think) when Big Brother was big, a housemate on launch night shouted out live that a certain Digital Spy forum user was a "$%^&* live on Channel 4.

You also had at one time official user accounts, people like Alan Sugar, the forums used to crash when big events happened. I also remember when I registered you had to give your debit card details and pay a fee.

I still visit the Sky part of forums, but I think really it's time to call it a day. The Digital Spy brand has lost all meaning, and most of the forums have become a pile of $$$$.

Maybe they can save the brand via social media, and use that side of things more, but if the whispers are true that moderators are no longer being paid, it's only a matter of weeks.

AVForums.com has taken some of DS's thunder for the home entertainment side. Thinkbroadband.com has an excellent ISP discussion forum which is more technical than you'd get on DS when it's largely bashing TalkTalk or moaning about Virgin Media price rises.

That leaves them with the general discussion, broadcasting and radio forums which attract the posters which have become the Daily Mail of forums.

DS was once an excellent forum for media discussion until the late noughties and then it lost their way.

The broadcasting forums have become a lot less active over the last five years or so especially after they were moved from the top of the forum index to further down the page.

The DS Forums were always inferior to TV Forum in my opinion, mainly because the people here are generally lovely and much nicer than those on DS, but also because they have always been massively popular which means there's not much of a community feel. I couldn't name any regulars I remember from DS when I used to post on it for example.

They lost a lot of users when Sky opened their forums as well. Prior to that, the Sky section was much more busy.

You also have the issue that the forum is running on very old software. Apparently it could not easily be migrated due to corruption in the database.
They would have had to start from scratch, so I was told.

The cards have been on the table for sometime. The search function has been broken, links don't work etc, this I think started in around 2013 (after the re-design). I don't think they could find justification to carry out an upgrade to the forum backend, and to leave it running like it is, is not sustainable.

Only choice is to kill it.

Yeah I was going to say, the forum is still not mobile friendly and is running on pretty old software, I would have thought they'd have updated it by now considering the popularity of the forums. But as you say it's a sign they don't care about them much now.