My 2 cents about planning, deploying and administrating forums
[Rev 0.1, Requires Revision, please excuse any language mistakes]
What’s the story?
People want to talk, express themselves, have their uniqueness and creativity unleashed.
Well that’s alright, this moves the business wheel, causes various types of content to be served together with ads. Gets you hits from all types of audience and popularity on the internet scale with not so much administrative effort from your side.
Forums continuously grow with the posts its members send, the type of content they exchange and how well it stands.
So the catch is what content would gather the biggest number of users, make them loyal and stick around.
It varies according to culture, language, gender, age and time, you can choose a topic that is so hot and everyone interested to talk about, but for only sometime before it goes away and people find another hot topic, or you could choose topics that are permanently the core interest of a certain or all slices of society.
It is a typical tradeoff, the more general the topics you choose, the more anyone can participate but they can easily find alternative forums or websites discussing that, and the more specific topics, the less the number of participants who are interested but the harder other forums can compete with the topics on your forum.
Planning for a Community
When you start to plan for your own community, forum, blogs, photo album, file storage, ads exchange, think large, think out of the box, think what would bring hundreds of thousands of users to your community, although you hardly have one user yet.
Putting in account that large volume of user, you will take well calculated decisions during the planning phase.
What are the aspects to consider when planning?
1-Language
What languages do you know? Does it really matter, maybe you have two or so friends who know English and some other language and would share with you the administration and moderation of the forum or community, this way you can launch large, start with a few languages targeting diverse audience. It might be good to have that, but would you always be aware what’s happening in a forum not speaking your language, do you trust the strategy and manageability of your friends, if you do, then go for it, if not then stick with your limited language choices.
What about the type of language, slang, mixed, hybrid, will you allow people to chat using clear English or slang or English characters representing another language..etc. Think how will this affect yout users, if you open the door, not everyone will understand what others are saying, leading to being pissed of, blocking your site and never visiting it again, or you would just target your site to a certain limited number of people who understand that hybrid language.
Defined the language, its type, now consider the technicalities related to language, what forums and what browsers support the language you chose, is it widely available and accessible. Will everyone be able to browse and view the characters properly, or chances are half the people will consider it a Chinese or spam site.
Now think money, the language you chose, how will it drive ads into your site, sensitive ads go through your content and get the closest proper ad match, if it cannot understand your language, it cannot display any ads.
What about hit exchange, the best way to market your site is to have a list of affiliates, partners and ad exchange sites, these are other forums that complement yours, once you are on good terms with them, you form together a bigger community, each specializing in a certain topic, so would your language choice have a good number of candidate partners and affiliates.
In terms of cost, certain language character set costs too much in term of database storage, slower in retrieval, encoding, searching and bandwidth consumption per request, are all these not an issue to you, or you have certain limitations, consider that when deciding.
Once you make your mind, your language choice will be used in categories, forums, and posts. You can though provide multilingual menus and skins, it doesn’t matter much if that was provided with your chosen forum base code.
You will use that language in the agreement, and maybe the registration form to ensure your user knows that language and is not a sad spammer.
2-Topic
Know you are constrained with the chosen language, which constraints your audience, so limit your topic choices according to that audience.
Take your time deciding about the topic, go around and see what do people like, search for and have hard times finding and collecting from a vast number of sites.
People would definitely like to have such stuff in one place, know others like them looking for that same stuff and share their experiences with one another.
Be smart, find a topic that will continuously be a core of debate, discussions and people’s need. Try to think how to make that topic appealing to more people through the time, the increasing number of members, posts and depth of topics discussed.
Do not always use yourself as a reference, think of others, they surely know different stuff than you, come from different backgrounds, have their own fantasies and desires.
Try to think in terms of audience, partners and ads. The durability of your topic is important, it also has not to allow too much spam or abuse, it has to target intelligent and smart people who won’t just keep using your site reading and reading and never contribute a thing, or click on an ad, or go to some partner site.
You need active and proactive users, so you could either look for that type and see what topics they like most or choose a topic and survey what kind of people would be interested in it.
Make sure you are careful with your choices, sometimes debate can cause fights and make your forum a war zone, this might end up with a very bad experience and sad memory in the minds of all your visitors, so instead of recommending your site, they will advise people to walk away.
Don’t fall for hot content, everyone needs it, so everyone will visit you, well they will be abusing you, taking that hot content from you, putting any crap posts and just leaving. Hot content might be movies, music or books that no one could find anywhere, be smart you can relay that to some other partner site, while keeping your loyal users inside, whenever they need such type of one time use content they can just visit your partner hungry to hits site and then back to you.
Why would they come back to you, because simply they will feel some respect from you as their discussions provider, you won’t have popups all over the place trying to cover up your hot content expenses like your partner, nor your content will be all about some useless chit, in fact the more interesting your topic and sub topics are, the more your users will have a better chance to gain knowledge, share experiences, make friends and even donate to keep you running.
3-Story
Have a decent war hero type of story, a challenging interesting tale that everyone would be proud to hear and carry on to different users, about how this forum was built, planned for and its topics chosen.
You can think of certain incidents or legends or some coincident that got that forum thought in your mind and how you and your friends dedicated yourself to the world, to make this thing happen.
How it cost you to build it, in terms of time, effort and money, while you were pleased with your visitors and users using your service for free, just make it romantic, heroic, a true sound story.
4-Fashion
Forum and community style is very important. If it is too trivial, you get empty headed people that can hardly type or know what they want to say, if it is so sophisticated, you will get complicated serial killers who just escaped prison or some geeks who will attempt to hack your site, email, destroy your laptop and lock down your host.
Be moderate, choose colors that talks with the soul and mind, common sense the menus and options, keep it simple, straight, light for the dialup and broadband users.
Above all, make it professional light or heavy, not a pimp site with purples, moving objects and balloons.
Enable and Empower the user, by giving him room for his personality to appear, you can do this by allowing several skins, lite or heavy versions, the ability to even upload their own skin.
5-Tools
It is all about that Empowerment concept, give your user enough tools to show what he feels, from smiley emoticons to professional rich text editors, to control panels and scratch pads, dashboards, signatures, notifications, subscriptions, avatars, ranks, history, ability to search, personal message, share photos, files, RSS feeds, news, personal contacts, invitations, blogging,… the whole 9 yards.
6-Technology
It is all about these terms:
Hosting Costs and Options, Support and Backup, Documentation, Community Modules, extensibility, upgradeability and Speed.
Go grab yourself all forums in market, check their requirements, try to install and deploy them on your machine, now compare their speeds, ease of use, installation, available versions, expected next release and how easy it is to upgrade, the available licenses and cost, their provided support, modules, closed or open code, easy to hack or secure with no vulnerabilities, knowledge base, and skins.
Now think in terms of hosting, to host all that, what it takes, what database, server and storage is required, what backup and deployment options does it require and how much do you have in your pocket.
You can provision certain stages in your plan, you can start small expected a small number of users and when you fulfill your primary goals you can upgrade hosting and even use other types of forums that handles more requests efficiently.
But remember, it takes time, money and effort to build a user trust, You do not want to lose that because of some technical details of hosting or backup or upgrading that he doesn’t give a damn about. He wants his forum available around the clock, he will come back to see who liked what he wrote and if his favorite contacts wrote new topics or not, are there any new photos in some friends’ album, …etc
The moment, they feel that their data is unsecure, that they might lose their posts, fotos, blogs or private messages, they are gone with no return.
I believe this is enough for one post, expect more to come in later publications.
What’s the story?
People want to talk, express themselves, have their uniqueness and creativity unleashed.
Well that’s alright, this moves the business wheel, causes various types of content to be served together with ads. Gets you hits from all types of audience and popularity on the internet scale with not so much administrative effort from your side.
Forums continuously grow with the posts its members send, the type of content they exchange and how well it stands.
So the catch is what content would gather the biggest number of users, make them loyal and stick around.
It varies according to culture, language, gender, age and time, you can choose a topic that is so hot and everyone interested to talk about, but for only sometime before it goes away and people find another hot topic, or you could choose topics that are permanently the core interest of a certain or all slices of society.
It is a typical tradeoff, the more general the topics you choose, the more anyone can participate but they can easily find alternative forums or websites discussing that, and the more specific topics, the less the number of participants who are interested but the harder other forums can compete with the topics on your forum.
Planning for a Community
When you start to plan for your own community, forum, blogs, photo album, file storage, ads exchange, think large, think out of the box, think what would bring hundreds of thousands of users to your community, although you hardly have one user yet.
Putting in account that large volume of user, you will take well calculated decisions during the planning phase.
What are the aspects to consider when planning?
1-Language
What languages do you know? Does it really matter, maybe you have two or so friends who know English and some other language and would share with you the administration and moderation of the forum or community, this way you can launch large, start with a few languages targeting diverse audience. It might be good to have that, but would you always be aware what’s happening in a forum not speaking your language, do you trust the strategy and manageability of your friends, if you do, then go for it, if not then stick with your limited language choices.
What about the type of language, slang, mixed, hybrid, will you allow people to chat using clear English or slang or English characters representing another language..etc. Think how will this affect yout users, if you open the door, not everyone will understand what others are saying, leading to being pissed of, blocking your site and never visiting it again, or you would just target your site to a certain limited number of people who understand that hybrid language.
Defined the language, its type, now consider the technicalities related to language, what forums and what browsers support the language you chose, is it widely available and accessible. Will everyone be able to browse and view the characters properly, or chances are half the people will consider it a Chinese or spam site.
Now think money, the language you chose, how will it drive ads into your site, sensitive ads go through your content and get the closest proper ad match, if it cannot understand your language, it cannot display any ads.
What about hit exchange, the best way to market your site is to have a list of affiliates, partners and ad exchange sites, these are other forums that complement yours, once you are on good terms with them, you form together a bigger community, each specializing in a certain topic, so would your language choice have a good number of candidate partners and affiliates.
In terms of cost, certain language character set costs too much in term of database storage, slower in retrieval, encoding, searching and bandwidth consumption per request, are all these not an issue to you, or you have certain limitations, consider that when deciding.
Once you make your mind, your language choice will be used in categories, forums, and posts. You can though provide multilingual menus and skins, it doesn’t matter much if that was provided with your chosen forum base code.
You will use that language in the agreement, and maybe the registration form to ensure your user knows that language and is not a sad spammer.
2-Topic
Know you are constrained with the chosen language, which constraints your audience, so limit your topic choices according to that audience.
Take your time deciding about the topic, go around and see what do people like, search for and have hard times finding and collecting from a vast number of sites.
People would definitely like to have such stuff in one place, know others like them looking for that same stuff and share their experiences with one another.
Be smart, find a topic that will continuously be a core of debate, discussions and people’s need. Try to think how to make that topic appealing to more people through the time, the increasing number of members, posts and depth of topics discussed.
Do not always use yourself as a reference, think of others, they surely know different stuff than you, come from different backgrounds, have their own fantasies and desires.
Try to think in terms of audience, partners and ads. The durability of your topic is important, it also has not to allow too much spam or abuse, it has to target intelligent and smart people who won’t just keep using your site reading and reading and never contribute a thing, or click on an ad, or go to some partner site.
You need active and proactive users, so you could either look for that type and see what topics they like most or choose a topic and survey what kind of people would be interested in it.
Make sure you are careful with your choices, sometimes debate can cause fights and make your forum a war zone, this might end up with a very bad experience and sad memory in the minds of all your visitors, so instead of recommending your site, they will advise people to walk away.
Don’t fall for hot content, everyone needs it, so everyone will visit you, well they will be abusing you, taking that hot content from you, putting any crap posts and just leaving. Hot content might be movies, music or books that no one could find anywhere, be smart you can relay that to some other partner site, while keeping your loyal users inside, whenever they need such type of one time use content they can just visit your partner hungry to hits site and then back to you.
Why would they come back to you, because simply they will feel some respect from you as their discussions provider, you won’t have popups all over the place trying to cover up your hot content expenses like your partner, nor your content will be all about some useless chit, in fact the more interesting your topic and sub topics are, the more your users will have a better chance to gain knowledge, share experiences, make friends and even donate to keep you running.
3-Story
Have a decent war hero type of story, a challenging interesting tale that everyone would be proud to hear and carry on to different users, about how this forum was built, planned for and its topics chosen.
You can think of certain incidents or legends or some coincident that got that forum thought in your mind and how you and your friends dedicated yourself to the world, to make this thing happen.
How it cost you to build it, in terms of time, effort and money, while you were pleased with your visitors and users using your service for free, just make it romantic, heroic, a true sound story.
4-Fashion
Forum and community style is very important. If it is too trivial, you get empty headed people that can hardly type or know what they want to say, if it is so sophisticated, you will get complicated serial killers who just escaped prison or some geeks who will attempt to hack your site, email, destroy your laptop and lock down your host.
Be moderate, choose colors that talks with the soul and mind, common sense the menus and options, keep it simple, straight, light for the dialup and broadband users.
Above all, make it professional light or heavy, not a pimp site with purples, moving objects and balloons.
Enable and Empower the user, by giving him room for his personality to appear, you can do this by allowing several skins, lite or heavy versions, the ability to even upload their own skin.
5-Tools
It is all about that Empowerment concept, give your user enough tools to show what he feels, from smiley emoticons to professional rich text editors, to control panels and scratch pads, dashboards, signatures, notifications, subscriptions, avatars, ranks, history, ability to search, personal message, share photos, files, RSS feeds, news, personal contacts, invitations, blogging,… the whole 9 yards.
6-Technology
It is all about these terms:
Hosting Costs and Options, Support and Backup, Documentation, Community Modules, extensibility, upgradeability and Speed.
Go grab yourself all forums in market, check their requirements, try to install and deploy them on your machine, now compare their speeds, ease of use, installation, available versions, expected next release and how easy it is to upgrade, the available licenses and cost, their provided support, modules, closed or open code, easy to hack or secure with no vulnerabilities, knowledge base, and skins.
Now think in terms of hosting, to host all that, what it takes, what database, server and storage is required, what backup and deployment options does it require and how much do you have in your pocket.
You can provision certain stages in your plan, you can start small expected a small number of users and when you fulfill your primary goals you can upgrade hosting and even use other types of forums that handles more requests efficiently.
But remember, it takes time, money and effort to build a user trust, You do not want to lose that because of some technical details of hosting or backup or upgrading that he doesn’t give a damn about. He wants his forum available around the clock, he will come back to see who liked what he wrote and if his favorite contacts wrote new topics or not, are there any new photos in some friends’ album, …etc
The moment, they feel that their data is unsecure, that they might lose their posts, fotos, blogs or private messages, they are gone with no return.
I believe this is enough for one post, expect more to come in later publications.
posted by voicy at
5/17/2006 11:49:00 PM
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