Web 2.0 startup news blog TechCrunch, headed by bigshot Michael Arrington, have launched discussion forums. Last year girly gadget blog Shiny Shiny did the same and they were not alone.
Forums are great, but I don’t want to see them as a necessary feature on blogs; the communication possibility is already there, in the comments. Sure, they’re tied to one particular subject – the blog post of course – but still. If you add a forum and encourage your readers to participate in discussions in it, you’ll soon see that the amount of comments on your posts will decline. The same discussion that normally would occur in your post comments, with the possible benefit of actually making the content better, now resides on your forum.
That’s not so bad? Well, it is, because you’ve probably written your blog posts for a reason, and your view on the topic in question can evolve when your readers weigh in. Compare that to the forum, where of course the same thing can come up, but it’s more likely to be less focused and therefore perhaps not going the full length.
Now, if I were in Arrington’s place I would’ve done the same thing. It would have been a cleaner solution perhaps, but too would launch forums. He’s got the massive amount of readers that is needed to support both forums and comments. But more importantly, he’s got the spin-off in the fact that he now won’t need to cope with as many e-mails about start-ups that wants him to give them coverage: they’re directed to the forum! A smart move.
You should only start a forum for your blog if you:
- Have lots of readers who comment all the time.
- Can integrate it smoothly in your blog design.
- Can offer the same login for both your blog and forum (dual memberships for one site are not OK).
- Have the time to moderate the forum.
- Have extra content and/or value to entice readers to be active in your forum.
TechCrunch fails 3, I’m sure they’ll manage 4 although that’ll be one to watch. One could argue that they haven’t integrated the forum well enough, but I’ll let ‘em pass there, although the solutions clashes a bit it still shares most of the TechCrunch elements. Check them out.
Do consider these points before adding a forum, and also do take a moment to think about what forum software to use. And most importantly, think long and hard what you’ll gain from launching a forum, and what you’ll lose. As always you need a plan to succeed.
I still believe that the absolute majority of blogs are better off without forums.
I read this post and it reminded me of my two forums … My biggest problem isn’t deleting the spam posts .. but the enormous amount of users that register to get their website. I deleted 548 names on the battling forum (half were banned anyway) and 321 names on the petlvr forum (since sep2006). Going through the memberlist at the shiny forum, it looks like they are having the same problem.
There’s nothing wrong with users posting to get their website URL out there, as long as they’re contributing to the content. And that is indeed a problem, because many will just register and get in there, not bothering with actually deliver any value to the forum visitors. It might work for PageRank reasons, search engines love links, but if they want people to click their links they should participate in a serious manner since that is one of the cheapest ways of getting noticed today.
What you could do to tackle these kind of problems is to:
a) disable signatures until X posts are met
b) openly state that all links in posts get a nofollow attribute for users that haven’t posted X times to prevent spam.
c) try to get moderators to help you.
Running a forum is hard work.