How to make a successful forum in 2012

[Ghost]

Managing forums has changed. Technology has changed completely. The following list of tips are some ideas for any forum, and then I'll share with you my grand project idea.

-Implement social media fully. Liking, sharing, and even let people login with Facebook, Twitter, etc etc.
-Use a generic look that is neutral. not dark. not overly light. somewhere in the middle.
-Make it simple. Get rid of confusing bb codes. Don't even show them in the post editor. Use one of those you get what you see plugins.
-Don't show ads when you are a new site. Just don't.

Okay. The grand idea.
-Get 5-10 LARGE forums together. Different topics.
So you'd find:
-Gaming
-Technology / webmaster
-Sports
etc etc. All the popular genres.
Put them into one site, one domain name, etc.
Just show a portal as the main page with trending discussions, the user CP shown etc.

Then the main forum page would show up as normal. No subforums shown. When you click 'Sports' though it then shows all the subforums (which are actually the original sections from the Sports site that you convinced to join your project) etc.

Anyways. It would be one site with 10 sections already popular and filled up with recent topics. Each Admin from those forums would be the admin of their section (their forum). They would keep their own staff and manage them.
Each section would operate as a separate site, but all in one place.

Could you imagine if you had:
All the largest/most popular sites from each section in the Promotion Directory ( viewforum.php?f=127 )
It would be a place you would want to join.

It would be amazing.
Yet too many people want their own site and are unwilling to hold hands and do a joint effort to make the largest forum ever known to mankind. A general forum that consists of like 10 sections that would be getting hundreds to thousands of posts each day.

You would only bring in sites that get around 200-1000 posts a day.
Let's say 200.
10 sites come in.
That's 2,000 posts a day on your site, 200 new posts in EACH section.
With the joint efforts, that will grow significantly as members would then have more sections to post in.
If your 10 sites all got 1,000 posts a day, you'd get 10,000+ posts a day. Now that's what I call a forum.

 

[-SnowBunni]

Your advice is basically telling people that they should make a general discussion board, there's already thousands of those with hardly any of them succeeding.

 

[jdab]

I don't want to put a negative attitude on this, but this usually don't go as planned with sites. Best of luck to you though.

 

[Ghost]

Your advice is basically telling people that they should make a general discussion board, there's already thousands of those with hardly any of them succeeding.

Errr....Did you read my post at all?
A general forum is over done. I am talking about a board that takes in already highly successful sites to create one GIANT board.

I am not talking about a quick merge Flux. Time and effort would be required to make it flawless.

I am not doing this. I'm just providing you guys with ideas - and I PMed some gen. forum owners to see if they'd be interested so if someone wants to go ahead with this, I can tell them what gen. forum owner's responses generally are.

 

[MofaKing]

Your advice is basically telling people that they should make a general discussion board, there's already thousands of those with hardly any of them succeeding.

While in essence this is what the end product would be like, it seems the advice is to have different users combine their sites to create a network-like forum where different sections are governed by their respective owners.

 

[Ghost]

I provided a way to do what needs to be done easily.

What needs to be done in one sentence:
Forums must unite if they want to exist in 2012 and the years ahead of us.

The hard, but better way to do this:
Create a network that allows users to view multiple forums, login, have an account, and have a central post count/stats, central messaging box (PMs that show PMs from all connected forums).

 

[master412160]

This idea reminds me of a already very successful network of forums which can be found at:

http://www.gamereplays.org/portals.php

That is just an epic place to be for all games related.

 

[Ghost]

This idea reminds me of a already very successful network of forums which can be found at:

http://www.gamereplays.org/portals.php

That is just an epic place to be for all games related.

Wow. That's huge. Yes, I am talking about a place kind of like that except more controlled.

However, a separate thought was that it just one site like WHATEVER.com and then users can create a forum and it goes like: FORUM-NAME.whatever.com

The catch/why it's different: members can post on any (forum).whatever.com site - they don't have to register on each specific forum.

 

[VirusZero]

So your idea is to start a brand new forum, then basically use it as a meta-forum to show content from already existing sites to create a larger more successful site based on the work of 5-10 others?

The main problem I have with this is that you'd have to do a metric ton of work to streamline all the forums. Making sure they each share similar themes and are all either on the same software or replicate the look/feel of that software so people can't tell they've gone from a MyBB forum to a vBulletin forum.
Plus you'd have to do a lot of script work to allow one user to register on 5-10 different forums at once. (That'd make a ton of queries and look ups to ensure names aren't being used/reserved on any of them.) And that's not counting any problems you'd have to solve where if a username is registered in multiple places to different people.


And supposing someone did join into this idea, what if they wanted out? Could they leave/quit? Would they be allowed? (I mean if their forum is all linked into this meta-forum and all things are equal you'd be effectively losing a 10-20% of your content in one shot.)

Personally I can't see anyone wanting to do this at all. Purely on technical reasons alone, if you own a site would you really want some unknown person coming in and fooling around with your forum/site's code? (Especially if they came in with delusions of grandeur...) Even if it were to grow your own site, it's too risky. One wrong slip and they could completely break everything you worked so hard for. (Or they could purposefully wreck things so they could increase their own site.)

Is it an intriguing idea? Yes. But there are far too many problems with it to ever be practical. Like what if admins don't want to have or be part of this largest forum ever? I mean some admins just want to have fun running their own site? (And if it just happens to be successful and have lots of active members, that's cool too.)
Plus there are different measures of success than just having lots of posts/members.

 

[Ghost]

I'm not talking about RSS or anything streamed^


I mentioned in the first post actually merging sites, and then redirecting their domai to the main hub.

The other post I made just uses a central memberbase much like Facebook Connect allows users to log in with that. Except that you have one acc. And you see all your stats, PMs etc in one place.

Forum owners eventually wouldn't be asked if they wanted to join. They'd realize that it's the best thing to do.
I'm more likely to post on an empty forum that has one appealing thread if I'm already registered.

Anyways the point is is that the future is a shared memberbase. You can either go with it, or not. But those who don't will never have te advantage of networked forums.

 

[-SnowBunni]

While in essence this is what the end product would be like, it seems the advice is to have different users combine their sites to create a network-like forum where different sections are governed by their respective owners.

Yes, but the end product is what the forum is. From a moderation and administration stand point, it's various sections manages by others but from a user stand point, which is the one that should matter most, it's just another general forum.

 

[VirusZero]

From the way you talked about it, this sounded like a meta-forum set up rather than a merger.

Though to actually merge databases? Yeah... That's possibly even harder than interlinking. So much conflict resolution it's not even funny. (Since you'd have essentially 5-10 sets of member 1 that'd have to be sorted.) And then however many equal number posts x10 (EX- if each forum had 50,000 posts to start with you'd have to sort through 250,000-500,000 posts to deal with duplicate post ids. Even worse if you had different database structures/setups too. Like MyBB for one part then phpBB for another...)

Plus I highly doubt anyone would even consider for a second merging. No one likes merging since they always end up losers in those. I mean there's no guarantee they'll even be kept around. Sure you can promise them they would, but you're also free to change you mind and get rid of them anyway. And then they lose their entire forum that they put all the hard work and effort into, while you get to reap it's rewards without actually doing anything.
(From their end it actually makes little sense to merge... Go from being the root admin in control of an entire forum to a section admin that can be booted off at any time? Yeah... I doubt anyone would go for that.)

Plus what if their members don't want to merge? I mean if they force a merge it could very well kill their site right there.

To me this sounds more like how to take out competition than how to be a successful forum.

And again I reiterate that different people have different ideas of success. I know some people that would call their sites successful even though they only have ~5 members. They didn't care about numbers and were instead focusing on having a good time. So success isn't measured by numbers and not everyone wants to just get a huge forum. If anything, I'd say that always trying to get huge numbers is more of a deathwish for a forum than anything since that admin is too focused on numbers than anything else.

As for this massive user database idea... I can't say I like that at all. That sounds like it'd be too tempting of a target for hacking or DDoS attacks.
And not to mention any global login system presents a tremendous security issue. (You lose access to one account and you've lost access to every site everywhere.) I know that's a risk I wouldn't be willing to take. At least right now if you lose access to one site's account the damage is localized to one spot. (Didn't you lose your domain/site recently? Can you imagine if that happen to this global login system? Someone gets into it and reroutes it so all logins directed to it fail. Every forum connected to it would essentially be killed.)

Also, I highly disagree with the idea that admins would "realise" it's the best thing. There are many times when admins might not want to have everything connected. (For example some sites, roleplays for example, you may want to be separated off since you wouldn't want people joining with their actual names. You want people to create accounts for their fictional character names and not have real people leaping in.)

 

[Ghost]

You don't get my point I'm making. It doesn't matter how hard it is, all that matters is that you can lose or you can win.

Forums are a dying breed.

 

[Bluezone777]

The idea you could find ten much less five large forums all with staff teams that won't have conflicts in regards to a merge appears impossible. There is a reason why so many forums exist and it's due to the atmosphere of the forum which is influenced not only by the subject matter being discussed but also the moderation and administration style of the staff.

Then you have the problem of a staff team that's for it and a community that's against the merge.

I also see how it would be a nightmare to navigate and to moderate as well. You then have the problem of entirely different moderation styles conflicting with each other. Even though one section doesn't moderate another would not prevent having confused members having to deal with a board with wildly different moderation styles which would further hamper the experience of being there. I see far too many issues that would hamper such an idea that are based around the fact that we are emotional beings and not logical ones.

The problem you think you are seeing is not that forums are no longer good enough but rather the people who use them changed for the worst.

You have far too many founders of boards who want quick success without having to do the work. You have far too many staff who just want a title and not actually have to earn it by doing anything. You have far too many members who can't fathom lifting a finger for anyone without getting something in return. That is the problem and that is what is dragging down the forum world in my view.

 

[Ghost]

You're right^
But forum scripts are also outdated and need to focus more on simplicity.
Kids hardly know how to use a forum. Though they can use an iPad at age 4.
That needs to change.

Also, we must focus on members. People go where their friends are. A giant network of accounts is a great way for people to make new friends and a community o grow.

 

[VirusZero]

Bluezone777 is right, there is a lot more to a merger than merely the technical aspects of forum 1 + forum 2 that I'd forgotten about. So thanks for pointing them out and talking about them.

In terms of simplicity... Forums are already pretty simple now. Registration takes maybe 3 minutes tops (username, password, enter your email address, basically done). Using a forum is extremely simple. Click section, click reply. Type. Press submit. How much simpler can you really get?

And taking away options like BBcode or HTML doesn't make things simpler, it just makes things more difficult. Like for BBcode/HTML, removing them only makes it tougher for those that want to modify their text. (Because sometimes you really do want to emphasize certain aspects so having bold or italics works out. And having a different colour or sized text works nicely to highlight things too. I know I use italics a fair bit and on here I colour code results of post exchanges so people can see at a glance how they faired and why. )

So realistically, I don't think you can get any simpler without striping away features. And that isn't always a good idea. (Didn't you try that with your General Forum? And where's that now?)

Also unless you have some hard evidence to back up your claim forums are dying, I call BS on that. It might be your opinion they are, but that's an entirely different matter from whether they actually are.

 

[Ghost]

You are far off with your inclusion of GF (which i sold for more than I paid for it, is available on the net right now, and run by one of the best forum managers I know).

Furthermore, I please go back and read my post. Did I say anything about removing text formatting? Nope, simply the advancement of it.

Facebook and Twitter are forums of the new age.
FP, GF, and Endless Fight are forums of the medieval times.

Why is FP successful? Because it has members that either need it because of the genre, or it already has members. How did it get most of its members? From back in the day.
Where do 'successful sites' get their members from? Sites that have members from back in the day.

But when all of us oldies are dead and gone, there won't be anyone fully intrigued in the old age style of forums. They must adapt to the desires and interests of the newest people in the tech world.

 

[Geoffrey]

I think the closest one will come to this is to set up a single log in with a single account for multiple forums, yet not actually combining into one forum and keeping staff teams, rules, policies, layouts, etc. separate. I'd personally love to see that catch on, but I'm not sure how many forum scripts allow such a set up to take place. I know proboards talked about adding something like that and Xenforo has a paid add on for it, but I'm not sure about the rest at this current time.

 

[Ghost]

Perhaps it isn't easy for a giant forum merge, but it is not impossible.
That is also a different idea than the single log on.

Single log in already exists; from Facebook. However, it is not fully customized for forums and unfortunately a lot of people get scared away from it.

In the future the internet will work with each other in all aspects, and it will just be one giant world that people keep the same ID on. You won't have 50 bajillion accounts.

 

[Geoffrey]

I didn't realize you could see the future. Tell me how you KNOW and can say so certainly (as you are and have been through out this topic) that the internet will all be connected with one account. I'm curious to know what insights you have received.