File this in the "no brainer" category, forums are hard work
Building up a new forum from zero, as we are doing with the boards that accompany our 3d world has, surprisingly enough been one of the more challenging aspects of community building.
Whilst some worlds de-emphasize forums, I've always thought they provide an important avenue for asynchronous interaction, and a sense of shared identity and history (maybe I'm just oldschool?).
Whilst you could make the argument that a forum should in theory just linearly grow as with the rest of the site, in practice that's not always the case. Despite having amassed 65,000 posts since alpha began, we still have a ways to go, if this were a book we'd be around chapter 2.
The goal for any forum of course is getting it to critical mass - where it become a rich, thriving and self perpetuating destination in its own right. Gaia Online shines as in that regard - it's buzzing with everything from creativity to random chatterboxing (4chan also has a lot going on, but let's not go into that here)
Our advisor Robin Harper (someone who knows plenty about community building) had warned us not to expect too much from the forum - "only a minority of active users are active in the forum".
She's right. What we've found up to now is the majority of the posting is being done by a small minority of users, those "super fans", including VIPs, mods & angels (our volunteer guides), and of course us in the admin team. This morning we Skyped with two of our U.S. volunteer interns ChanndieT and Leelu to see what we could do to accelerate the growth rate. Apart from just needing time, energy and TLC (as forums tend to need to get started), we did identify a few specific problems:
1/ Many active posters today are signified with a bolded, different color name, which has the effect of intimidating newcomers from getting involved (a lot of bold does overwhelm)
2/ Our forum style up to now has been sparse, and to be frank, boring graphically
3/ Using the stock standard PHPBB3 forum install (we've done custom integration with the rest of our site but most of the forum end is at default settings), and as such we haven't been exactly that user friendly
So, after that brainstorm we came up with some immediate things we just rolled out:
1/ Dropped the separate bolded colors for mods, angels etc and just made them all the same - but still keeping forum ranks in posts so people could know who to contact for help:
2/ We decided to come up with some graphical icons for our different forum sections. As we had no time or art resources available, we decided to just make do and grab matching profile pics from members and massage them into a nice format:
3/ We implemented the "quick reply" module, to let members reply instantly rather than needing to hit reply and loading another page.
So here's how the first section of our tweaked forum now looks:
Small but meaningful changes done today
Initial feedback seems to be good in the last few hours, but of course, the proof is in the pudding, and we'll be closely checking our new post and new poster count in the next few days... stay tuned for results :)
...and for all new forum admins out there battling like we are, keep pluggin away!
but really that's not the main thing, it's to enjoy getting involved and bouncing around ideas..
