Mistakes that will kill a forum
A writer at SEOrefugee writes about 10 mistakes that will KILL a forum. There are several things that can effectively kill even the most established forum. There’s lots of good insight here.
1 Excessive Ads - Hey, there’s nothing wrong with making some money off your forum. But, when your advertisements begin to take up more space on your forum than your content, you’ve got a problem. People visit forums to talk to other people with similar interests. They want to share their ideas or ask questions.
2 Cliques - OK look, your forum is supposed to be an online community, not an online clique. If your community is not open and welcoming to new members and fresh ideas, your forum will quickly stop growing, become stagnant, and eventually die out.
3 Trolls - never a good thing for a forumTrolls - Everyone’s encountered a troll whether you knew it or not. The Urban Dictionary defines a troll as “someone who gets pleasure by typing annoying/controversial/offensive words on internet forums or message boards.” If you run a forum long enough, probably every one of your members will annoy you from time to time. That’s just human nature. Trolls on the other hand, bring absolutely NO value to the forum and instead sit back and generally annoy you along with everyone else on the forum.
4 Fights - Now don’t think for one second that everyone on your forum will agree with each other all the time. It’s just not going to happen. In fact, you don’t even WANT it to happen. Controversy is good remember? However, there’s a BIG difference between a healthy debate/heated discussion and a fight. Once a discussion or debate devolves into name calling and personal attacks, it’s time to shut it down. If you let fights fester, they’ll begin infecting the rest of the forum and will likely end up driving away people on one, or both sides of the issue.
5 You need moderators that are Kung-Fu MastersHeavy Handed Moderating - Have you ever heard the saying that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”? Or maybe, “the power’s gone to his head”? Both of these things can befall you, or your moderators if you don’t watch out for it. Forum Moderators or Administrators are given power to keep the rest of the forum in line. But, as Uncle Ben told Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.
6 Lack of Moderation - Yes, I just got done telling you that Over Moderation will kill your forum. The truth is, so will a lack of moderation. If you find yourself spending hours a day just trying to control your forum spam, it’s time to find some Mods. Get friends or family to help out or promote some trusted and long time members. Consult them, give them a heads up before implementing changes, and listen to them when they offer up suggestions.
7 Over Posting - Look, people don’t come to a forum to hear one person talk all the time. It’s a community, not a soap box. If you want it to be all about you, start a blog.
8 Violating Privacy - This one’s a no-brainer. When people sign up for your forum, they almost always have to give you some information. Whether that’s an email address or some other bit of privileged information, don’t compromise it.
9 Slow Site - You remember how slow dial-up internet access used to be? It sucked right? Especially if you’d ever used a high speed connection. Well, having too many ads (yes, it’s worth mentioning again), widgets, plugins, or those cool ad-ons included in your forum can drag your site back to the dark ages.
10 Over promising and under delivering - This is pretty much a good rule for life in general but it definitely applies to forums.
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