Other Software > Developer's Corner

Forum Concept..

<< < (2/2)

Paul Keith:
My suggestion is always to start with fewer sections, and expand when there is too much overlap in topics.  the biggest problem i find with new forums is too many empty or near-empty sections, making it feel deserted and hard to keep track of posts.  a smaller number of sections makes for a feeling of a closer community.
-mouser (June 24, 2011, 03:53 PM)
--- End quote ---

This can't be overstated. Though I haven't managed a forum (a visited hosted forum at least), I experienced how expanding too soon kills off a budding community because near empty/slow sub-forums gives the impression to future visitors that they shouldn't bother registering. Hell, I've seen some forums with just the initial sub-forums and the forums are mostly dead even though you would think from the blogs, they were active. Independent games forum are notorious for this.

The necessity for categories may even go so far in the direction of the quality of sticky threads you are putting there rather than the organization of the categories. Maybe even getting a consistent back and forth conversation with one regular member just to keep the contents rolling although this is assuming you are starting literally from a 0 member forum.

P.S. I haven't read the book so maybe this is things you know about already. Forums are just such tricky things nowadays. I think it's easier to build a Facebook discussion page than forum nowadays even though I have a hard time regularly checking Facebook, much less scouring all the places where a discussion is going. Nowadays it's just a triple team battle from getting members of other forums to register, to them wanting to engage with blogs in the first place, to them feeling like they want to regularly check your forum over not only a more established one but ones where there's a huge crowd of Twitter/Facebook/Google Plus/LinkedIn users.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page