Do you allow the discussion of competitors?

At my community, we don't allow the discussion of competitors because the owners resorted to spam tactics - joining our community, and spamming our members with their forum link, quite ridiculous.

So, do you allow the discussion of competitors? Or no?

 

Nope, I dont like competitor sites being advertised in anyway. However I may refer to them just by using the simple term "Admin Forum" Instead of using their real name.

 

Good point - and because they spammed me, I just refer to them as "other forum", and really, we have more online than them - so does that mean, they're not much of competitors?

 

They are competitors when they are trying to beat you, and/or your are trying to beat them.. etc.

 

Ya, what's funny most of my competitors opened when my community went down last year. They opened in July/August 2010, we re-launched Jan 21, 2011 - and we're just about 5k to 6k posts from catching up to them, and surpassing them, but we always have more users online.

 

I usually let competitors advertise, so long as they do not post and spam the link all over the place. I haven't gotten to the point of banning the discussion or advertising competitors yet, but I may have to do that if members purposely leach activity and members off of my board.

 

Thats not a good idea to let competitors advertise on your forum. What if they become more successful than you?

 

How long have you been allowing this? Have any of your members left to the competitor forums? I've never seen this done before, so am quite curious to here your thoughts.

 

To reply to both of you, my forum hasn't become active enough to warrant moderating every post of a known competitor. If I did, it would be harder to get posts on an already small forum. 1140 posts total on my forum, is not enough posts in my opinion to have to block anything dealing with advertising forums.

 

Yea I didn't start disallowing competitors until my forums was active..

 

Well what you just said isn't discussion but advertisement and those are 2 very different things.

Advertisement is just useless spam while a discussion can lead to improvement of your forum.
I noticed a lot of things that other forums bothered from their competitors and they received a great success and response from their community.

So discussion means what we can improve or add something that the competition has and from my experience it can be useful.

 

Well, if you allow discussion of your competitiors - you also open the doors for people who may leave your site. Like you can make a topic about them, and get replies, thus; increasing your content, but don't you think if they like the other community, they may leave? I've never allowed it, so I'm quite curious.

How big is your competitor? Are you bigger than them?

 

Yes I do

It will be silly to disallow them

But they shall post links for information. Not advertising. Rather than promotion section of course

 

I think we are misunderstand each other.
For example you can go visit a forum and see what things they have that you could adopt and improve and that would be useful to your community. Then you suggest that on your forums saying you got inspired by other forums (or you don't its all up to you) and you would like to see how it would work here.

Now what you cant allow yourself is, and this is where a lot of people go wrong, to unintentional promote them. When you talk about other be objective, don't say wow they have a great chat box and search engine but say while I was there I found that we could and can improve certain areas of our forums more precisely the chat box and the search engine but before I do that I would like to see what you think about it.

Now see what I did, I mentioned that I saw it somewhere else and that way I gave credit where credit is due but I didn't tell them wow that so great because if I said it like that I would have provoked their curiosity and they would check it out. I made it so that it seems like its a thing we do every day a standard and of course I asked them about their opinion so that they are more concentrated on giving you advice then going there and checking it out.

Do you get my drift now.

 

Ya, I get your point now - my members are talking about our competitor forum on my community now, and its showing what type of owner, that other competitor is.

I know I liked to do that as well - especially if the other community has better features than us, we'd ask the members if they'd like those features too.

 

Well I hope it works out for you.

And it's good to keep in mind that a lot of people can be active on at least 5 forums.
So you actually never lose them if they join the other forum also.

 

I don't really care when people talk about my competitors, as long as it doesn't get out of control and turn into a flame war. Chances are they've joined to get away from the competition anyways...

 

I never was into owning a forum for the sake of competition, so I really don't mind if we talk about other general discussion forums or not. As long as it doesn't turn into a big flame war or a he said/she said ordeal, then I'm okay with talking about other general discussion sites. Although these kinds of discussions rarely happen to begin with, though, but still...

 

I can see where you are coming from, but the discussion of competitors are important or not really depends on the niche of your site, and your competitors.

 

You make a good point as well. I mean, if it was a forum like this, then obviously I can see why the discussion of competitors would be against the rules, and that's highly understandable. But for more laid-back forums, you would think that most people would be a tiny bit lenient about that, wouldn't you? Promotion forums, resource forums, graphics forums, and probably even RPG's I can see this being frowned upon; but a site like mine where there's not much going on or is not as strict, then I wouldn't see it being a problem, but again, that's just me; and every administrator is different as well.