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Okay, as someone who's run quite a few forums in the past and has written more than a few articles about community management, my experience here is that succes

by CM30 7y ago

Okay, as someone who's run quite a few forums in the past and has written more than a few articles about community management, my experience here is that successful forums tend to have a few things in common: 1. A topic that hasn't been tapped into that much, but which has an existing audience just waiting to get involved. This was the case with Wario Forums, which had no competition whatsoever when it launched, and was started pretty much because myself and a few others in the fandom wanted a forum about the series and were willing to help get one off the ground. 2. An awful lot of dedication to the field from its founder. It's a cliche now, but forums and communities in general are usually not built in a day/week/month. So the founder needs to be super dedicated to the subject area, and willing to put in potentially weeks of unpaid work getting the site off the ground. 3. Unique and interesting content about the topic. Again, this was pretty easy for me on Wario Forums, the people I invited had experience translating games from Japanese, creating remixes of the music, making mods and level editors, etc, and I had a lot of knowledge of the series and what kinds of discussions would be interesting to a fan. But yeah, this is where the whole 'passion' aspect comes in again. If you're not absolutely fanatical about the subject and don't possess a lot of knowledge about it, you'll struggle to create anything interesting enough to get people to join/take notice. Seriously though, I'd recommend you check out some of the articles about this topic on sites like The Admin Zone, Feverbee and Managing Communities if you need some more in depth advice on the subject: https://theadminzone.com/ams/ https://theadminzone.com/ams/ https://www.feverbee.com/richs-blog/ https://www.feverbee.com/richs-blog/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/ http://www.managingcommunities.com/

adventured 7y ago
I agree with most of what you said, except I'd increase this: > and willing to put in potentially weeks of unpaid work getting the site off the ground. To a minimum of six months as an assumed grind. Anybody going into building a community should regard that as the absolute minimum. Sometimes you get lucky and lightning hits, however more often you're going to struggle along for many painfully dry months trying to get a self-sustaining momentum rolling.

by CM30 7y ago

adventured 7y ago

I agree with most of what you said, except I'd increase this: > and willing to put in potentially weeks of unpaid work getting the site off the ground. To a minimum of six months as an assumed grind. Anybody going into building a community should regard that as the absolute minimum. Sometimes you get lucky and lightning hits, however more often you're going to struggle along for many painfully dry months trying to get a self-sustaining momentum rolling.