Discussion forums...

OK, what the heck do I need to do in order to get people to spend more time in the discussion forums? Do I need to just shut down the BOI for several days hoping people will wander into those other forums searching for the BOI?

I see people in those forums posting questions that go unanswered by anyone. With as many registered members here, it sure seems to me that SOMEONE would take the time to help those people out.

I've offered forum sponsors to help in this respect, but only just a few even bothered to take me up on it.

So just what is the problem here?

Hey WS,

I am really, really new here... although I've been involved in countless forums in the past decade. If I could offer my personal opinion:

I saw a very, very similar situation with the computer geek forums at [H]ard|OCP (www.hardforums.com) a couple of years ago. They had an abundance of very technically specific forums covering niche and general areas of knowledge. But they also had those "other" forums... one that was called "General Mayhem", which was an "almost anything goes" type of banter forum, and another called "The Soapbox" that was intended to be a more highbrow and sophisticated discussion/debate forum to deal with current events, controversial topics, and heated discussion. It was arguably the largest forum of its kind on the internet (technical computer discussion/modding/etc) in membership... in content it was kind of light because most of the traffic was.... you guessed it, the two "talking" forums. They finally took down "General Mayhem", which was bumping almost 20 threads a minute the last time I was on it, due to concerns that it was becoming less about the technology and more about the mindless babble. Good call, IMO, but overnight the posting userbase went from 40,000 to 20,000. Not too long after The Soapbox was next to go... and another round of poster exodus. The forums are now totally without any "off topic" community areas, but there is such a strong core group within each subtopic area that the feeling of community is not totally lost.

All that to say this: an off-topic or "community area" is ABSOLUTELY VITAL for the health and longevity of an Internet forum. People must be allowed to get to know each other outside of the constructs of "keeping on topic". However, allowing for a forum where the nature of the content is confrontational and divisive by nature creates a completely different phenomenon: it actually attracts its OWN userbase of uninitiated visitors from the Internet who find it, camp in it, and are happy to stay there because in all actuality they really DON'T CARE ONE BIT about the actual subject of the forums... they're just happy they've found a place to argue, rant, cause trouble, and in general be the person they don't have the balls to be in real life.

Well, there you have it... as a fellow Admin over at www.arachonboards.com and a regular at well over three dozen major forums over the years, I have witnessed firsthand the phenomenon whereof I speak. Bottom line is this: you have to allow a community/off-topic area, but discussion/debate/flame war/fight style forums all have the potential to cause the problems I spoke of. Your BOI is a special case, as it is both a helpful tool and a spirited discussion/debate/flame room. How you would go about attracting people away from that environment I do not know... I know you have your fair share of experts here, but as is the case with most of the invertebrate experts we try to entice onto our forums, they are usually too busy with their dealership/job/personal collection to be bothered to babysit a bunch of questions on an Internet forum. The root issue here is, I feel, that your BOI has inadvertently become the "community" area instead of the General BS forum, which would be far more appropriate. People congregate there because it gets the most traffic, and people stay there because that's where all the traffic is... big Catch-22.

Somehow you have to convince people to hang out in General BS and use BOI only for what it's there for... it's become far too "community" for its own good, from what I can see.

plink, plink.

Yeah, I do see your point. And it does have good and bad sides on that coin. I am trying to siphon off the worst of the debacles into the HELL forum, and so far it does seem to be having a beneficial influence on the BOI.

I have tried to rearrange the layers here until I am blue in the face, but there doesn't seem to be a perfect way to display the right amount of forums, but not too much ro be overwhelming and make page loading a real problem, or falling into the abyss of not having enough visible for a new person to grasp what is all here and where it is located.

Perhaps specific discussion forums about animals are just getting to be old hat to everyone. That and there is a specific website for just about any topic you would care to discuss, so maybe the catchall general purpose websites that cover them all are just going to be a thing of the past.

Who knows? I guess I could start off by just deleting any forum that doesn't get a new post placed in it within a certain time frame. Cut it down to the bone and just see if anyone even notices the forums have been removed.

And thanks for your input. It's nice having an outside view here for a better perspective of what the world is like outside of the walls of this site. I guess maybe I should get out more.....

Since I've been using the "find new posts" feature, I've been participating in other rooms a little more. It seems that the leopard gecko and cornsnake room has picked up a little but I agree that the rest of the specific animal discussion rooms are still dead. I don't know what to suggest, other than reminding people that some rooms are still sponsorless...?

How hard is it to combine forums without losing posts? I think maybe combining forums that don't have a post in 15 days would be a good way to lower the number of forums (which make it hard to find what your looking for). For example you have (in the General Discussion Area) Misc Issues, Photography, Taxonomy to just name a few that have very infrequent posts. Put them all in the General Herp Talk area. Maybe if people see more movement on the lists (1 forum that has new posts every day, as opposed to 8 that have one new post per week) that will generate more interest while removing the need for multiple clicks and less screen scroll.

WebSlave said:

Yeah, I do see your point. And it does have good and bad sides on that coin. I am trying to siphon off the worst of the debacles into the HELL forum, and so far it does seem to be having a beneficial influence on the BOI.

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Yeah... I tend to take a more "sledgehammer" approach with interpersonal feuds. I'm not a patient person. FC might be better served by not letting people air their dirty laundry at all... if they've got that kind of axe to grind, they can do it over the phone or email or even PM. My favorite line when handing out warnings is "take it to PM"

WebSlave said:

I have tried to rearrange the layers here until I am blue in the face, but there doesn't seem to be a perfect way to display the right amount of forums, but not too much ro be overwhelming and make page loading a real problem, or falling into the abyss of not having enough visible for a new person to grasp what is all here and where it is located.

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Looking at the massive amounts of forums you have, I completely understand... we've never had more than a dozen and a half or so forums at AB, so maintenance has never been a huge huge headache. Most newbies don't "get" the idea of subforums, so that's why we've avoided them so far...

WebSlave said:

Perhaps specific discussion forums about animals are just getting to be old hat to everyone. That and there is a specific website for just about any topic you would care to discuss, so maybe the catchall general purpose websites that cover them all are just going to be a thing of the past.

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I hear ya brother... what's even worse than that are the copycat forums. People that hang out at your forums for a few months and then start their own lame one thinking it must be SO COOL to be GOD of you OWN FORUM. Little do they realize how much work it is, and they quickly become ghost towns.

What would probably help is to reevaluate and reestablish what FC's MAIN goal and mission is. Obviously, you're sort of trapped by your name... you can't exactly have a site encompassing "fauna" and delete all forums except those about reptiles. By the same token, the work that would go into ramping up traffic in your amphibian or bird forums seems hardly worth it with so many other sites out there, like you mentioned.

WebSlave said:

Who knows? I guess I could start off by just deleting any forum that doesn't get a new post placed in it within a certain time frame. Cut it down to the bone and just see if anyone even notices the forums have been removed.

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Yeah, it's all about cutting back to your core... there appear to be a couple of forums in "Admin & General" that could be condensed with no ill effect. Also, things to consider would be combining monitors and tegus into a single forum... leo and regular geckoes, etc etc... sometimes forums that are too specific can actually be counter-productive in that people come here all excited because they found a "News and Salamander forum!!!", only to go away without even reading it once they see there are only a handful of posts. Maybe they were the best damn 30 posts anywhere on the 'Net concerning Salamanders and Newts, but if people forego them because it appears to be dead, it really doesn't matter in the end.

OTOH, it's hard to justify breaking down the framework for the site, because it breeds a sense of optimism that someday, ALL these forums could be bustling.

WebSlave said:

And thanks for your input. It's nice having an outside view here for a better perspective of what the world is like outside of the walls of this site. I guess maybe I should get out more.....

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Heh... I barely ever get out of AB, I can't imagine the hours you must spend here. It's hard... like I said earlier, all those wannabes that make their own forum on Proboards or Voy think it's going to be so cool to run a forum, but it's a hellofa lot of work. And I don't spend nearly the time that Scott, the owner, does... he spends probably three times as much time as I do administering the site and he's got two kids and over 100 tarantulas to take care of!

Something to keep in mind... people come here mainly for commerce, as your site appears to have been built on the idea of it being a Classifieds site. Maybe the topic-specific forums not brimming with traffic isn't a totally bad thing because you're really here to breed trade and commerce. Hard to say... that's up to you and the rest of the Site staff to decide.

Believe it or not, the structure you see here now IS greatly condensed from what it used to be.

Take a look at my CornSnakes.com Forums. I had this sort of structure for EVERY specific herp related forum in here. Overkill? Yeah sure was. But after the success of the CornSnakes.com forum, I thought for certain that this would be well received. Didn't exactly work out that way, so I folded up all those subforums into the main forum for each specific herp group to simplify things.

In one respect, yeah I can see where simplification will help the newbies get their feet wet without confusing them. But on the other hand, what happens when they become seasoned members and start to get bored? Well, I would like to think that this site has enough "Easter Eggs" to keep them continually discovering something new here that they didn't know about before. Try to forestall the bored and old hat feeling that over-familiarity can sometimes produce.

I really don't hide that I prefer targeting the upper crust of the technically proficient visitors to this site. Yeah, I may lose a couple of people here and there that are not up to the challenge. But I would rather lose them because they just gave up trying to learn rather than losing those more technically savvy viewers who gave up and left because there was nothing new and interesting left here for them. I have never felt that the world should be plated with rubber baby buggy bumpers, nor have I felt that the lowest common denominator is really all that good for humanity as a species. Anyone who really wants to get the most OUT of this site, has the opportunity to do so if they really try. Sooner or later they will figure out that they also have to put something IN to this site in return to allow someone else to gain something from their being here as well. That is what should keep the gears turning.

People should WANT to be able to leave their mark and have their words read by the world. To me, that is the real attraction of running a website like this. It is reaching the entire world via the internet. Anyone anywhere in the world tied into the net can come to this site and see what I have started in motion. THAT is the thrill of all this. That and seeing so many people jumping in and contributing their words, as building blocks, to what this is becoming. To think that maybe WE have done something that has, at least in a tiny bit, changed the world for the better.

Corny, I know, but heck, why else would someone put so much effort into something like this?

probably WAY too simplistic, and possibly even tried in the past at some point, but how about listing the discussion groups (in the same format you have now) at the top and moving the admin groups lower? That way the discussion group listings will be up there alongside the BOI latest post section and more 'in your face'.

Just a thought, shrug...

Stubby

Actually, I did try that before, but I guess there is no reason why I can't try it again. To be honest, I am thinking of getting rid of the entire Laws and Legislative Alerts section anyway, since the traffic there doesn't warrant me keeping it. I may very well take that attitude about any section or forum here that is not apparently being used enough to be worth keeping around.

I probably need to set up my test site again for this board so I can fiddle around without doing it on the live system. Changes are pretty easy with this software, but MAJOR changes can be a MAJOR pain in the butt to roll back if I don't like the results I see.