If you have a website then adding a forum to it increases traffic and the popularity of your site. If your site is about a specialist hobby for example, on which you are an expert, it can be useful to put up a forum so that your visitors can ask questions, and benefit not only from your knowledge, but also from that of other visitors.
When you first add a forum to your site you cannot expect to attract many members, and at first you may get disillusioned. But give it time, and you will find your forum should start to take off and begin to buzz. Be prepared to wait 6 months or more!
But what happens when it eventually takes off? Well, here is the crunch. The more successful your forum, the more work you will have to do!
Firstly, you need to vet and monitor who is joining your forum. You will be amazed at the number of people who try to join simply to advertise another website – and believe me, unless you are running a pharmaceutical site or giving sex advice most of these websites will be totally inappropriate for your forum. Especially if it is a hobby site and you are attracting teenagers to the conversations. So, the answer is that you will have to vet and approve each person who joins. TIP: Forum software, such as that provided with the Vodahost package (click link below for more information) can be altered so that people cannot add a website when they join your forum. Another tip is to add a question on registration asking ‘are you human?’. Bots will ignore this question, and you can prevent registration if this happens.
Secondly you will need to moderate all the comments on your forum – and reading through and checking for language etc. will take quite a bit of your time. You may find yourself settling down to add a new page to your site, and then find you’ve spent the whole evening catching up on all the new posts on your forum, and answering them as well. What is the danger of not doing this? You need to keep on top of your posts as spammers will try and infiltrate the forum – again, particularly important if you have young people posting. Although you may have followed the tip above and stopped people entering a website when they register, they can easily put one on in a post!
Thirdly, if you are getting a number of new posts every day, what will happen if you can’t check the forum for a few days, if you take a holiday for example? You need to make sure you, or a trusted person, can keep in touch with what is going on. TIP: Set up one or more ‘moderators’, people who enjoy using the forum, and who you can trust to remove or edit inappropriate entries. As more members join, set up more moderators – these can either be people you already know and trust, or people whose posts you admire and who are knowledgeable about the subject. You will probably find they are flattered by being asked to help you, and will give you the satisfaction of knowing that your forum is in save hands.
Finally, forums are great fun. To see a successful forum thrive is a great part of website building and can give you an enormous sense of actually having added something. Just like anything else, success also comes with work attached. Make sure you are organised and know how to respond to the problems, and all will be well.
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