Case study — Community platform
The People's Forum
A failing hosted forum replaced with a custom platform the community chose to move to.
- page views since launch
- 3.7m
- sessions a week
- 21,000
- in a single peak week
- 650,000
The situation
The People's Forum is a global Everton supporters' community with decades of history. Its hosted platform had become unreliable — posts frequently failing, pages not loading — and the provider was no longer supporting the product.
The risk was that if the platform failed outright or the service was withdrawn, there would be no way to bring the community back together. Long-standing members had been discussing a move for around a year.
Hosting on the old platform was funded by donations well into the future, so there was no deadline forcing a rushed migration. That made it possible to choose the timing deliberately.
The real constraint
The hard requirement was not technical. It was that the community would only move if the new platform kept the simplicity, charm and ease of use of the old one.
This is where replatforming projects usually fail. A modernised rebuild that members find unfamiliar or over-designed does not get adopted, and an unadopted forum is the same outcome as a dead one.
Two further constraints shaped the work. There was limited administrative access to the old platform, so no threads and no user accounts could be migrated — every member would need to re-register and the new site would start cold on content.
The content loss was smaller than it sounds. The old platform deleted older posts automatically, holding months of history rather than years. The project was also not-for-profit, funded entirely by donations from the user base.
Approach
A Classic view, built in from the start.
The new platform ships with a toggle that matches the fonts, styling and basic layout of the old forum. Members who wanted the familiar experience could keep it; members who wanted the modern one could have that instead. This turned the single biggest objection — that the community would lose its character — from a blocker into a preference setting.
Both forums running side by side.
Rather than a cutover, the new site opened for early registration while the old one stayed live. Members could test, post and compare before committing.
Design decided in the open.
Look, feel and functionality were debated publicly in threads on both forums, with members feeding back throughout the build. The community shaped the product.
Launched in the summer gap.
Go-live was timed for the close season, when forum traffic is at its lowest. That gave room to test, migrate users gradually and prove the platform under light load before the season's traffic arrived.
What was built
A custom web application replacing the hosted forum product, launched July 2026 at peoplesforum.co.uk. Everything members relied on was replicated, several things were improved, and the gaps the old platform had left were filled.
Carried across
- Threaded discussion with nested replies
- Daily digest email
- Member registration and moderation
Rebuilt and improved
- Thread search, optimised to return results faster than the original
- Classic and modern display modes, switchable per user
- Donations, previously limited in payment options, now handled through PayPal and Stripe integrations
- Account security, with stronger password requirements than the original platform enforced
New
- A permanent archive. The old platform deleted older posts automatically; every post on the new site is preserved
- A fixtures page with kick-off times and TV coverage, built after members travelling from overseas booked flights and hotels for fixtures that were later moved for broadcast
- Post bookmarking, letting members keep track of threads they want to return to
- Likes on posts, removing the need for reply-only-to-agree posts that added noise to threads
The platform is still maintained and developed in-service, with fixes and feature updates released on an ongoing basis.
Results
The community moved. With no imported threads and no ported accounts, members re-registered and migrated by choice over the opening weeks, and traffic has held at roughly 21,000 sessions a week since.
The late-August peak is the engineering result. It fell on the summer transfer deadline, when members check the forum continuously for news — the heaviest and most predictable load event in a football community's year.
In that week the platform absorbed 42,782 sessions and 650,296 page views, around three and a half times its current baseline, with no loss of performance. The system it replaced had been failing under ordinary load.
Engagement has stayed high throughout: 8 to 9 pages per session, average session duration above five minutes, and a bounce rate between 21% and 28%. Total page views since launch are approximately 3.7 million.
The funding has followed. Donations have covered the build cost, three years of domain registration and the next 17 months of running costs. The financial position is published on the site, so members can see what has been raised and what it pays for before deciding whether to give.
What this demonstrates
Replatforming projects rarely fail on the build. They fail when the people who were meant to use the new one decide not to.
This one worked because the hardest requirement was treated as a design problem rather than a technical one. The Classic view removed the reason to object. Parallel running removed the risk of committing. Open design discussion meant the community owned the decision rather than having it imposed.
It also resolved the risk that started it. A community whose history was being quietly deleted, on a platform that could have disappeared without warning, now has one built to preserve everything it posts.