Why should members join your forum?

[CM30]

Well, there's a friendly community, a nice design with a bunch of neat features and a ton of content you'll never find anywhere else. That's three reasons to join right there, at least if you fall into the site's target audience.

However, even if those weren't the case, there's also one other interesting difference between my current forum and my previous ones:

It's the only site in its niche. So if you're into that series, well you don't have any other viable options to be honest.

 

[Shannon Apple]

I guess, for us, we have a unique situation and a lot of history. We have a small geek culture (mostly gaming and anime) forum that is built on the back of a large community that's existed since 2002. The old site was owned by one person, run completely by us volunteers, and sorta sold to some morons who destroyed the site. Sadly, that is the fate of many of the big old forums from the early 00s.

Left completely homeless at the beginning of 2016, we set up an Indiegogo to raise 500 dollars to get a forum license and create a new home. We raised 4 times that much because the members who were still with us had that much trust in us. We are now 100% community owned (that will never EVER be sold) and have a user donated budget that will keep the forum open for years to come. Given the history, we have this core group of users who all know each other, and are friends. When new users join, and provided they are active enough to get to know people, they get welcomed fairly quickly into that family. There is an IRC room where some of us go to chat on weekdays. Here and there, we still have members of our old community finding their way back to us.

I've been on that community's staff now for over 10 years believe it or not. We don't treat it as a business, but more as a labour of love. It is something that we want to make successful, but not at the expense of our members. 🙂

 

[IntoxNitram]

For me, I think its a case of the fact that many forums in my niche are poorly managed. I see a lot of them high in Google rankings where the staff team hasn't visited in years. We are simple, easy to use and offer discussions with something that can drastically help people in their lives.