Recommendations on managing a forum

Sorry if it's too much self-promo, but here's a list of recommendations I recently posted on managing communities:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/blogs/brian/archives/2005/07/how_to_build_a.html

I currently admin about 7,000 members across 4 forums, which currently create about 700 posts per day in total. All good fun. :)

I thought you were in Yorkshire?

Some good points in that article, Brian... I'm not sure I agree with the fake members part or the part about having discussions with multiple personalities, mind you... :eek:

Moved to Scotland. :)

As for the fake members issue - indeed, it is a contentious one, and I certianly don't actively suggest dishonesty to members.

It's more a way of generating useful content for johnny-no-mates webmasters (like me!) if they find themselves setting up a new forum with no users to begin with - generating content via alias exchanges that can draw people in via longtail search especially, who then may join and post replies to such topics.

Obviously, any forum that starts with a community already has momentum to start with - this place looks like one of those types of forums. Without that instant community, though, it can be extremely hard to develop momentum. I guess this is why there are a number of admins offering money for posts these days.

Yes, although I think there are other ways to encourage posting..

I like your reference to "critical mass" -- that's a term I've been using for about a year now regarding new forums (fora?) and I think it's apt, both with respect to number of members and number of posts.

From my observations, the first few hundred members and posts are the most difficult. With a decently optimized forum, somewhere around 500 of either and the forum starts to gather momentum. Around 1000 members, the forum starts to seriously accelerate.

I also think your caution not to start with a whole lot of empty categories is also important: Start with a few categories/forums and split them as the topics become more diverse and the number of posts in the subtopics starts to increase.

I have mixed feelings about how an admin looks after members find out he has "multiple" personalities later.

If the point is content, I would suggest that creating actual website content, not forum content, would pay off bigger then seeding a forum with conversations with yourself.

I'm not suggesting not posting to seed the forum, but I am suggesting from experience, that with the content based site Vs. the conversation based sites, the content based site does better.

"Forum conversations" are not as strong as "topic specific pages" even if they contain the same facts as content. That seems to be my experience.

Moved to Scotland. :)

As for the fake members issue - indeed, it is a contentious one, and I certianly don't actively suggest dishonesty to members.

It's more a way of generating useful content for johnny-no-mates webmasters (like me!) if they find themselves setting up a new forum with no users to begin with - generating content via alias exchanges that can draw people in via longtail search especially, who then may join and post replies to such topics.


An effective way to do this without raising ethical issues is to use bots to retrieve rss feeds and post them in forums you designate. You can give them clever names, and automate the entire process right down to which bot retrieves which feed, which forum it's posted in, how many articles are posted per retrieval, and how often it's done. There's no need for phony alias exchanges, and I suspect you'll do much better with search referrals this way.