Personally I believe a forum games section is a vital part of a forum. I joined a Kpop forum because I like Kpop but I realized the thing that keeps people coming back to this forum is not only for the main news section but also the forum games section because it provides a place for people with similar interests to hang out and have fun. I posted the game where members try to get 30 comments before a staff comments and within 4 days it has gotten over 2000 replies. The game has gotten pretty intense haha.
What are your thoughts on having a forum games section?
People like to chill out, and games are the best way to get oneself out from the busy schedules. Forum games help to meet up with interesting people and engage in conversations with like mindedness. It helps to share and discuss small little things.
This topic is usually pretty controversial. Most webmasters do not like to have a forum games section because the posts tend to be like spam and they said search engines do not like it. It can be harmful to the SEO and things like that. I personally do not care, though. As said in the first post, some members enjoy playing the forum games so it's a great way to get to know each other. I remember I got to know people more from playing in forum games too. It was fun and it helped to bring people together. I don't really care about technical things like SEO, and I think we should try to give maximum fun for the community, so I'd say yes.
Important if you want your site to be a fun, somewhat informal community.
So in other words, necessary for a general chat/mostly informal gaming site or something, not necessary/important for a support forum or 'professional' site.
As for SEO... don't bother with the whole thing. Seriously, run a site because you enjoy doing so, not because you want a quick path to easy money.
I think every forum that I've joined has had one. I think it's pretty fun to have a place to play various games such 'this or that' or 'count to 10,000'. As long as post count is off there.
Like Mikaya, most forums I have joined have had a forum games section. I'm 50/50 on it. I can see the fun and need of forum games, but I also don't like them. On my forum, I do not have any forum games, and my members have never requested it.
As Mikaya said, every forum games section should have post counts turned off.
Another point of debate is whether to enable or disable the post count. Almost in all forums I ever visited had it disabled, although I'm not too sure way. I didn't disable post count when my forum was still around because even game posts were posts so why not count it altogether. Not that there is a harmful effect if we enable or disable the post count, though.
As far as my forum topic goes...very, very unimportant. In fact I don't think anyone would ever use it even if I did install it. It all depends on the niche your forum belongs to and the user age groups that frequent it. For example my forum is political, serious types come in, and many are of older age. They don't care for games.
Yea I find forum games to be somewhat annoying sometimes. I don't have it on my forum. If members want to play forum games they can just make a topic in the 'general discussion' section but Forum games don't need it's own forum/section on the main forum.
They're good to have. May be popular, may not, but it's very good to facilitate it. People get very passionate about their games. On my forum I've not seen a lot of activity so far on gaming, but it's there for when it picks up.
