I am asking this because I had been to a local forum with thousands of member. The boards are so dynamic that my thread today will be in page 5 tomorrow. I seem to lose my footing on the posts such that interaction is limited to only a few unless you want to be a stray cat. You have to choose members of the community that you would interact with because you cannot interact with the thousands of active member. That's the downside of a dynamic forum.
Does a huge forum remains interesting?
- Thread starter Corzhens
- Start date
Bluezone777
Dinner Team Leader
A forum is interesting because of the people on it not how many people are on it however I find a smaller board tends to have a community that values their members more simply because they aren't led to take what they have for granted because of the abundance of what they have namely members and posts which is what I found often happens on larger forums.
I agree completely with the both of you!
Shannon Apple
Resident
The solution is forming clubs and societies. That's how we dealt with it back in the day when our old forum was this active. We let users come to us with ideas for clubs and if it wasn't done before, AND was something that would interest users, we approved it. It helped to integrate new users into smaller groups, where they can find people with similar interests. New users are the future of your community, so it is important that they feel like they can be part of it.
Our current forum is too small for that now. We have around 300 members, obviously not ALL of them active. It's quite difficult to grow a very big forum in this day and age. But, maybe forums will bounce back.
I disagree with the point of larger forums not valuing their members. I can tell you that we did. However, it's almost impossible to get to know everyone. There are two types of people that basically stand out in such a community: Great Contributors who make great posts and get noticed for all the right reasons and Drama Queens who cause problems and get noticed for the wrong reasons. If you were relatively new and we noticed you outside of your intro thread, it was for one of these two reasons. In the staff room we'd be like "Oh I really like this new user X" or "Watch this other guy he looks like he might be here to cause trouble." Everyone else in between are the body of the community. You get to know some of them if they are active enough, if they're an occasional poster who only posts every now and then, it's way harder to ever notice them because the posts get lost in the frenzy. I highly doubt staff on a good forum take them for granted. New user retention is essential. ^^
Our current forum is too small for that now. We have around 300 members, obviously not ALL of them active. It's quite difficult to grow a very big forum in this day and age. But, maybe forums will bounce back.
I disagree with the point of larger forums not valuing their members. I can tell you that we did. However, it's almost impossible to get to know everyone. There are two types of people that basically stand out in such a community: Great Contributors who make great posts and get noticed for all the right reasons and Drama Queens who cause problems and get noticed for the wrong reasons. If you were relatively new and we noticed you outside of your intro thread, it was for one of these two reasons. In the staff room we'd be like "Oh I really like this new user X" or "Watch this other guy he looks like he might be here to cause trouble." Everyone else in between are the body of the community. You get to know some of them if they are active enough, if they're an occasional poster who only posts every now and then, it's way harder to ever notice them because the posts get lost in the frenzy. I highly doubt staff on a good forum take them for granted. New user retention is essential. ^^
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One of my forums has 2000+ members. I'm the sole Admin/Mod. It's pretty easy to handle, but has really blown up lately with 10-20 members on-line all the time now. I'm behind on about 50 posts. hehehe
Shannon Apple
Resident
@Lord Saru: Absolutely. The worst thing about large forums as well is that if a user is VERY well known, breaks rules and is reprimanded by staff, it's often likely that they'll rally an army of members against the staff. Of course you'll have 100's of people who are going to defend the staff's position because they agree with the ban, but it is an absolute nightmare dealing with that. LOL! I remember one time years ago actually having to ban at least 5 people overnight to give them a timeout after we suspended someone for 2 weeks. All he had to do was keep his trap shut, serve out his ban and behave better on his return. His crying just got more people in the staff's bad books. >>
2000 members is a small forum though @zoldos. I'd classify "huge" as the ones that have maybe 50k+ members. Ones that have 100s of posts per hour and difficult to integrate into like the OP is talking about.
Well done on having 10-20 members online at all times though. That's pretty decent for a 2000 member forum. 😀
2000 members is a small forum though @zoldos. I'd classify "huge" as the ones that have maybe 50k+ members. Ones that have 100s of posts per hour and difficult to integrate into like the OP is talking about.
Well done on having 10-20 members online at all times though. That's pretty decent for a 2000 member forum. 😀
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Thanks! It's taken 2+ years. My new forum has about 25 members and around 1300+ posts. A little less than a month old!! hehe
I think so, because there is so many people who are active on there, and you could meet someone who you like on there. A forum with many people will be able to help you find members who like the same subject and you can have some interesting conversations. Also, a big forum is bound to have more posts and topics to discuss about so you won't get bored, if you prefer getting to know an admin or the owner, then that is a good point of a small forum.
I bought a forum with 9,000 members, consistently had 5 to 15 members online. The best I've seen is 20-ish.
That's 19 users online, and all moderators online at once. Under my control. They all left because PSVita was on a decline.
This site used to have 1,000 views a day. Not a week. A day.
I bought a site with around 90k members, but when I sent a mass e-mail, all I got was bounced e-mails after bounced emails. So, to solve the problem, I pruned the zero posters and ended up with 13k members. Which is a good thing.
Now all I gotta do is buy a gaming forum to satisfy Xbox gamers, and PlayStation 4 gamers. Then after that, go after Nintendo Switch.
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I'm sorry to hear that. It's happened to me before, but I was inexperienced at the time and he ruined the forum with dirty stuff on it.
I blocked him so he got mad and had like 50 of his jerk friends spam my forum to the point I had to shut it down. Then he revealed to me how he'd been cyber stalking me for months, Googling me and making fake accounts on every site I was on so he could make fun of me. What a loser.
I hope that he doesn't do it still. Spam is something that I take an no no for and if there are to much spam then that member goes
Shannon Apple
Resident
Oh shit lol. This actually happened to me on anime-forumsdotcom a couple of years ago. The complete assholes who bought the place let everyone who is anyone into the server provided that they did the work for free. There were exploits installed, I have no doubt about that. The forum was redirected many times. A member that I knew was a bit of a power hungry sod got admin, removed my account from superadmin and deleted it, then deleted his own XD. The account was 10 years old, so I was like OMG! Thousands of posts lmao. He also took over a couple of other accounts, but I changed the passwords and emailed the owners.
I did manage to run a mySQL query to restore my posts onto a new account though, so it basically looked like my account was recovered. Since the forum had over 3million posts, that took a whole day to run and update. It really isn't a wonder why we let the forum rot in the end and set up Sakuga City. All of the members were sick of those people and most of them left. That's why our forum is very small now. It's not that people didn't follow us, it's because they already had enough and quit before we ran the campaign to set up a new site. We tried to help the new owners for over a year. Staff dropped off one by one and admins were finally like... "enough's enough!"
One really has to be careful who they give full admin access to for sure.
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@zoldos @Shannon Apple I'm sorry that you both went through those sorts of things, it's horrible.
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