Roku simply pulled the plug on this function after 15 years

Roku, the favored set-top field and TV streaming service supplier, has formally killed off its legacy Group Boards platform as of December 31, 2025 (via Cord Cutters News). The transfer represents a sweeping change within the firm’s on-line customer support portfolio, with customers now being solely pointed in direction of the Roku Support website for troubleshooting functions.

As a help useful resource, the Roku Help web site is crammed with devoted article guides, FAQ pages, AI-powered helper instruments, and the flexibility to talk with help brokers about particular {hardware} and software program points. That being stated, this resolution is much from a one-to-one substitute for the Roku Group Boards, which relied on an natural mixture of each Roku workers and Roku customers all serving to each other to resolve widespread and fewer widespread points throughout the group.

Natural web tradition provides method to company sterility

On the one hand, Roku’s choice to consolidate its internet-based customer support choices is sensible because it streamlines help below a single umbrella, and it supplies the corporate extra management over the data and troubleshooting strategies on provide. However, having a devoted discussion board the place everyone seems to be welcome to contribute is one thing that’ll be missed by many Roku followers, because it permits for the proliferation of a very grassroots group.

For me, essentially the most disappointing side of Roku’s choice to transition over to the Roku Help web site lies in the truth that it seemingly did not archive the legacy Group Boards within the course of. The latter platform had been out there since early within the 2010s, and, over the course of fifteen years, it had collected an enormous again catalog of user-created help threads. This extra natural help system, crammed with area of interest user-facing points and documented fixes, is solely now not part of the equation.

Extra broadly, I really feel that the lack of the Roku Group Boards is a loss for web tradition as a complete, changing a way of community-driven problem-solving with one thing way more company and sterile. The web is actually a really totally different place in 2026 when in comparison with 2010, and whereas we now have AI, LLMs, and different such technical developments, I reckon we have additionally misplaced a few of that all-too-important human contact within the course of.