Could AI Help Bring Old Forums Back to Life?

[Luca76]

Old forums often contain years of useful knowledge, but the best answers are buried under dead links, broken images, outdated advice, and thousands of ordinary posts. AI could help by summarising long threads, spotting likely solutions, tagging old topics, rewriting confusing titles, and helping newcomers find the useful parts without removing the original conversation. The danger is that too much automation could flatten the character of a forum, so the best use is probably AI as a librarian rather than AI as a replacement for members

[SuperPosition]

AI as a librarian is exactly the right framing. Forums do not need a robot pretending to be a regular, they need help surfacing the good material

[Shannon91]

Thread summaries would be brilliant on old support forums. Sometimes the answer is on page seven after three people tried the wrong fix first

[Matt_81]

I would want the original posts kept visible. Summaries are useful, but the discussion and corrections are where the trust comes from

[Freya]

This could be a genuinely positive use of AI for communities if it is done transparently and users can still browse the real threads