The Most Important Thing About Forums and Community Management...

Is the actual community/members/community spirit. Yes it's the bleedingly obvious. But guess what?

I don't think a lot of people who talk of the 'problems with forums' and their future seem to realise this. Instead, I think they go wrong because the treat everything like a technical/development issue rather than a personal one.

Discourse and all these new forum setups won't 'save' forums. XenForo didn't 'save' forums. Coming up with a shiny new toy revolving around cloud computing and SAAS and responsive design and mobile phone apps won't 'save' forums.

What will save them is the community. Focusing on the people, the community spirit, getting them enjoying the site enough to post. And do you know what?

From what I've seen on thousands of active sites (and thousands of dead ones), the majority of members don't give a toss about the technology or the 'design'.

I've seen active sites which looked absolutely awful in their basic setup and got thousands or even millions of people using them. Fan Fiction.net (and just about any other fan fic archive out there) look dated as hell. They're also still absolutely packed by people posting their work and giving opinions on that of others. Lemmy's Land is a really old, long time Mario fan site which still has a lot of fan fic submissions and quite a lot of forum posts. The site looks like it was down in Microsoft FrontPage in about 1995. NeoGAF and Talking Time Forums, two very active gaming sites. Both have practically unmodified vBulletin 3 series styles and about three sections. Or how about Serebii.net? The site is currently the most popular Pokemon fan site in the world, yet has a style/setup which is seen by even those IN the subject area as somewhat old fashioned and overly dark and dreary. No one cares.

And then you've got sites which for all extents and purposes, are basically like forum discussion communities but have strange setups which are nothing like either your 'traditional' forum or your 'modern' looking redesign. I saw a site a few months ago on Freewebs which had Disqus comments on every page on the site. Guess what? It had something like a hundred thousand comments in each section, as people had used a hosted comments system as an impromptu forum and made an active and loyal community out of it. Or how about Ycombinator's Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Super simple in every way. Simple layout, simple structure... yet it's still probably bigger than most forums and social networks.

Are forums less popular? Maybe, but I think a lot of people just get it all wrong. They assume tech is a magic bullet that'll solve their community woes, as if switching to something new and shiny will boost activity sky high all over again. It won't. It might cause a few more posts for about a week or so as people get used to the shiny new look (or complain non stop about it). It'll then just die down like it did before.

Active forums and sites are such because people want to use them and care for the community/people. They're not like a problem to be solved via the 'magic' of technology, as if a bunch of fancy geek terms act like waving a magic wand to fix all your issues.

Please remember that.

 

+1 a million times over. The people first concept took me the longest to grasp when I started running boards.

If there is a sense of community and belonging people will stay around with the crappiest software and flakiest of hosting. Every once in a while I'll be Googling something and come across a God-awful ugly antiquated forum and more often than not there is a thriving community behind it providing information that I wanted/needed. In contrast, I've wound up on quite a few dead boards that ran the latest and greatest software and a flashy theme.

 

I keep coming back to these communities (and this one - the forum / admin community) because of the people. Initially, the resource was the bait, but the people are the hook. You need to nail both in order to sustain activity.

There's still a sweet spot that can be filled...

Social sites have the people
Q/A sites have clear-cut resources and content

But, some of us want to discuss great content with great people.

 

Problem I see with many webmasters today is they think the forum software you use matters too much. It can help, but it isn't the be all and end all of everything, same as using a custom theme isn't. And people who are interested in discussion about a certain topic looking for a forum to discus it on, they won't be put off by what forum software it uses, or if they use a custom theme or not. All that is in the mind of the forum owner themselves, what they think is needed based on their own likes. But time and time again you can find crap looking sites, using inferior forum software doing very well, while others using a nice custom theme and commercial forum software sit idol doing nothing.

It's more about covering the right topic and having good discussion listed tempting others into wanting to join. That's more important than what you use and the theme.

 

Thanks; I'm hoping I can take another swing and make a dent in the forum industry. The technology is so far behind, it's ripe with opportunity for disruption. As stated above, it's not the forum software that breaks or makes the site... it may help or ruin the UX a little, but that's such a small part of it. It's about people.

How are we managing and encouraging people to do awesome things on our sites?

 

Great words of advice and excellent post @CM30