Hi everyone, welcome to Fora! I’m glad that you found us. As the Founder, I wanted to take a minute to share with you what we are doing and why.

Forums are a deeply personal investment for me. When I was a kid, I spent hours in forums geeking out on pro football, Chevy Camaros, watches, and home theater setups. These were hobbies I cared about, and the communities helped shape me. At the same time, though, searching through forums was often frustrating because the best information could be hard to find. Sometimes I’d spend an hour wading through an 80-page thread. But when I found that nugget I needed from another enthusiast, it was helpful and exhilarating.

I founded Fora because I wanted to make those nuggets easier to find, and share that exhilaration with as many people as possible. Over the past two decades, we’ve assembled a network of over 1,000 great forums, including AVS Forum, Bimmerfest, and WatchUSeek. Some of these we’ve created, but many we’ve acquired from passionate founders, a number of whom still work with us today to grow their communities. Today, Fora connects tens of millions of enthusiasts around common interests every month.

In recent years, however, we’ve noticed two opposing trends. Inside our forums, enthusiasts love talking about products. Our communities generate millions of authentic product insights every year. They’re human and impartial. They know the difference between titanium and aluminum, and that you can’t safely put a 22-inch wheel on just any vehicle.

But outside our forums, it is increasingly difficult to find credible information about products. Search results and product detail pages are often filled with fake reviews, unlabeled sponsored content, and unvetted AI-generated articles. Our goal is to help solve this problem by organizing authentic perspectives about products, and providing a trusted destination where curious explorers can discover cool products for their hobbies.

Filling this need around community, authenticity, and products, means that we ourselves will need to be authentic, and tackle the problem with scrappiness and curiosity. We will need to be respectful and clear with each other. We will need to challenge our assumptions through data and experiments. We will need to be unafraid to fail, learn, and then succeed.

We have been applying our values of authenticity, scrappiness, and curiosity, in order to make it easier to find our best content. Examples include our content newsletters that are read by millions of enthusiasts each week; our Entity Browse module that summarizes what people think about each product in a thread; our Product Explorer module at the bottom of our threads that displays the top products people are talking about; and our product detail pages that collect perspectives about a product from the entire community. And we have a lot more in the works that we can’t wait to share with you, including new experiences around product discovery that we hope you’ll find both fun and helpful.

So here we go! I invite you to follow this next phase in our journey. As we share more about what we’re learning, we’re interested to hear your thoughts and reflections as well. And if this sounds like a journey you’d like to join, drop us a line. We’d love to get to know you and see if there’s an opportunity to work together to help restore authenticity to the Internet.