Drive Forum participation

[Laura]

What's the best way to encourage a large number of members to participate in discussions?Lots of categories or a few?Heavy or light moderation?Do you feature discussions on the Forum tab or Main page?Thanks!Laura

[M]

I think it is important in this type of setting to use heavy moderation. I really really dislike seeing people trying to spam their network on a forum such as this.

[Mark B]

Not so fast. Definitely moderate spam, but be careful not to moderate dissent too much or I fear it will get adversarial like last time. Afterall moderation is a euphamism for censorship. :-)

[SteveH]

I would be careful of the moderation unless it is for obvious spam reasons. What would be really good is if there were some network creators that could moderate the forum. One of the problems with the previous network creators area was that people felt it was being too controlled by Ning. Discussions were closed or responses deleted as soon as anything negative was said (and I already noticed that in the sign terms of service but hope it is not has heavy handed this time).

And I would feature discussions on the main page since there isn't going to be a whole lot else on this network driving traffic.

Thanks,
Steve

[John McDonald]

Thanks Steve. Great advice. I would like to start recruiting network creators as moderators this week. Are you interested?

Thanks!
John

[SteveH]

Yes, I would be interested in this.

Thanks,
Steve

[SteveH]

One thing in general that would be helpful is if you "Feature" the forum posts on the upcoming releases until they are released so they don't get lost in the mix (eg, the post on the email release next week).

Thanks,
Steve

[Travis]

+1 for this

I also wish that you could follow a particular forum, in addition to a thread. That way we could just follow the entire announcement area, for instance, and be proactively notified when something was posted in there.

[The PL Team (d&e)]

The only way is the long and lonely journey of talking to yourself for a while.

Just when you think you're going insane, other people will join you. Find sources of fun news in addition to news that applies to your network content. Digg.com stories are a great source for stories to discuss, an occassional off the wall onion post to stir things up and make people step in and say, "OK, now THAT was funny!"

-dc

[The PL Team (d&e)]

Two other things:

Leaderboard / Points System, most DEFINITELY. Anything members can get "points" for, they'll eat up! Believe me, they don't even care if they get nothing for the points. People are competitive by nature, and LOVE to watch themselves climb up the ranks.

AND

Displaying latest discussions on the main page. We took this away for awhile, saw traffic really decrease, and had people BEGGING to have it back. We actually just re-added this to the homepage yesterday and we have already seen a huge increase in traffic and content.

-d

[Saf]

As i stated on an other discussion:

In addition to this, in "Categories" section of our forums, next to Discussions list there are two columns, "Replies" an "Latest activities", and I'd like to see a third column that would display "Views", just like with photos and videos. Just because a discussion hasn't been replied to doesn't mean that it hasn't been read, probably more times than it has been replied to. So i think that this numbers would boost up our forum pages... The same is with blog posts...

For now, a member can estimate the interest for his blogs and discussions only through number of comments/replies, and this "views" counter would encourage activity.