Monday 6 August 2012

How To Manage A Community Forum Website

Communities & Technologies

Forums are popular community platform used by many webmasters. It’s all about managing a group of people who are creating content simultaneously managing a forum needs special strategy otherwise it would be either be successful or it would sink like a ship.

No Spam: If forum is left without moderation soon it becomes a house of spam there is a physiology behind it like when a new registered member visits a forum and see other members spamming he to gets confidence and starts to post junk and spam post just to get his signature links live, just the opposite thing happens with quality and strict forum and here the same guy post quality content why? As he is afraid that if he spam he would get his account banned so constant moderation is important but as your forum grows it may become hard to fight spam and in that case you can appoints your trusted member of the forum to get the role of moderators to make your work lot easier.

Spam Registration: A lot of forum posting software are available now that automatically post post and threads on thousands of forums generally these software’s make an automated registration and so to avoid getting hit by this software be sure to add extra registration protection for your forum.

Over strictness: Some forums show zero tolerance against those who spam but banning instantly must not be used why? The user you may ban may not sign up again and every user is important if you would have warned him maybe he would have stopped spamming and post at least some quality post but when things get out of your hand you always have the last option.

Engaging: Make sure that your forum is engaging, there are lots of social networking tools and apps available online that you can add on your forum and lower the bounce rate to make your forum cool and interesting.

Contest: you can bring more excitement in the community by organizing a contest and you can reward the winner with cash prize or an animated trophy that blinks in his profile this will create competitiveness among members to get to the top you can also name the contest like “Poster Of The Month” or anything that goes catchy.

Facebook Login: People hate sign up and it’s a fact we sign up everywhere from email to any social networking website and this makes some people anti sign up mentality they just get irritated when they see that they have to register for doing certain things providing facebook login as a alternate login system will be a great improvement you can do on your forum so that user don’t have to register to post on your forum they can use their facebook id.

Custom designing: There are now lots of forums online and market is bit saturated so you need to have a unique look that makes you different from the crowd.
And remember a good forum has three ten times more post then it’s member and has high number of active members

 Photo by eschipul on Flickr License By http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

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