Is Your Forum Boring? - No New Posts?
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Sold! Having online forums for any Web site sounds like a great idea! By learning some code or using easy online tools, anyone can include user-friendly message boards on their own site. Placing forums on your site is actually the easiest part of the business of online message boards. What comes next is the tough part.
The forums are set up on site, the topics carefully planned and all parameters carefully set. You’ve done all the work and placed all the proper pages so users can take advantage. So, why aren’t you getting any posts, or any user discussion at all? If you find that your forums are going to weed instead of conversation, you have to face the painful question which torments many, many site designers:
Is your forum boring?
Dissecting the Problem
So what’s wrong? If you notice a lack of new posts and ongoing discussion in your forums, try to dissect the problem before making any major changes to your site or the message boards themselves. Sometimes, the problem with your forums may require a simple fix or slight tweak in the right direction.
First, are you getting a high level of traffic to your site and your forums in general? Check your page stats to see how many visitors you’re getting. The problem may not be with your forums at all, but with a lack of traffic on your site.
If you’re getting plenty of traffic and your forums are still staying stagnant, check all the links to the forums and give your general page navigation a careful once-over. Are the forums easy to find? Do you offer highly-visible links to the forums in more than one place, on multiple pages? Make sure traffic can get one-click access to your message boards. If your visitors have troubling finding your forums, they aren’t going to make use of them.
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