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What kind of awareness (or marketing) are you doing for that website? HN is one good start. For design, sorry, but your theme/UX sucks very badly. Lets start w

by Joakal 15y ago

What kind of awareness (or marketing) are you doing for that website? HN is one good start. For design, sorry, but your theme/UX sucks very badly. Lets start with the biggest problem; frontpage: It seems that your frontpage shows very little value for returning members. Instead of seeing a list of threads on a frontpage on like HN, Reddit, email, etc, users are forced to check each forum section if there are threads worth reading/contributing. Stack Overflow example: It rose so quickly because it was backed by noted bloggers eg CodingHorror. Those people worked together to create a question/answer website and was able to drive interested traffic that kept coming back. Why? Because it was highly relevant and people that comment on the noted blogs also did it on Stack Overflow. Further, Stack Overflow's frontpage has new stuff on frontpage and lots of direction to go. Reddit example: They created many fake accounts and submitted stuff in order to gain a feedback loop. Even PG sent some users their way although it was YC funded. Plus the Reddit frontpage has relevant content of full titles with pictures. Everything is simple and easy.

dchuk 15y ago
I hear ya, but neither Stack Overflow nor Reddit are true forums. SO is a Q&A site format, and Reddit is affected by temporal ranking decay in a way different than traditional web forums and boards. Reddit and HN are essentially topic aggregators, which lend well to trends and current activity but not to long term forum discussions. I'm an active member of forums that have two or three year old threads that are still active on a daily basis. Because of the algorithmic ranking system of HN, Reddit, etc, you'll simply never get that. I am honestly not doing too much to promote the forum other than posting it here and attempting to reply quickly to everything. A few dozen folks committing to the forum in the interest of getting it off the ground could easily start it moving forward momentum wise. I'm open to running ads somewhere to get traction, but there aren't many places I think that would be conducive to ads. As for design, I just used one of the free themes available for MyBB. The homepage is very similar to many other forums online (such as anything powered by vbulletin). I can start looking around for themes that show more details/activity though. I certainly appreciate your feedback and would love to incorporate as many updates and enhancements as possible to get things moving. Quite honestly, I would love for even just half a dozen people starting threads and answering replies and we can start to get the ball moving. After that, it should be able to grow fairly organically. EDIT: I found this plugin that I will go ahead and install: http://mods.mybb.com/view/recent-topics-on-index-page http://mods.mybb.com/view/recent-topics-on-index-page that will show recent threads on the home page. I think that's a decent solution for showing more recent activity to users.
- Joakal 15y ago
  It's still a tiny section of the forum. I do think you should do away with 80% of irrelevant content somehow. Here's Australia's biggest forum: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ It's quite balanced, content vs labels.
  - dchuk 15y ago
    I see what you mean, I'll do some research into hacking at MyBB this weekend and see if I can make it look like that. Thanks for the suggestion! EDIT: I found a pretty nice plugin that shows the most recent threads created and most recent replies in a thread, as well as most active users. You can see it here at the bottom of the index page: http://www.saasaholics.com/ http://www.saasaholics.com/ It also updates via ajax every 5 seconds, kinda neat. What do you think?

by Joakal 15y ago

dchuk 15y ago

I hear ya, but neither Stack Overflow nor Reddit are true forums. SO is a Q&A site format, and Reddit is affected by temporal ranking decay in a way different than traditional web forums and boards. Reddit and HN are essentially topic aggregators, which lend well to trends and current activity but not to long term forum discussions. I'm an active member of forums that have two or three year old threads that are still active on a daily basis. Because of the algorithmic ranking system of HN, Reddit, etc, you'll simply never get that. I am honestly not doing too much to promote the forum other than posting it here and attempting to reply quickly to everything. A few dozen folks committing to the forum in the interest of getting it off the ground could easily start it moving forward momentum wise. I'm open to running ads somewhere to get traction, but there aren't many places I think that would be conducive to ads. As for design, I just used one of the free themes available for MyBB. The homepage is very similar to many other forums online (such as anything powered by vbulletin). I can start looking around for themes that show more details/activity though. I certainly appreciate your feedback and would love to incorporate as many updates and enhancements as possible to get things moving. Quite honestly, I would love for even just half a dozen people starting threads and answering replies and we can start to get the ball moving. After that, it should be able to grow fairly organically. EDIT: I found this plugin that I will go ahead and install: http://mods.mybb.com/view/recent-topics-on-index-page http://mods.mybb.com/view/recent-topics-on-index-page that will show recent threads on the home page. I think that's a decent solution for showing more recent activity to users.

Joakal 15y ago
It's still a tiny section of the forum. I do think you should do away with 80% of irrelevant content somehow. Here's Australia's biggest forum: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/ It's quite balanced, content vs labels.
- dchuk 15y ago
  I see what you mean, I'll do some research into hacking at MyBB this weekend and see if I can make it look like that. Thanks for the suggestion! EDIT: I found a pretty nice plugin that shows the most recent threads created and most recent replies in a thread, as well as most active users. You can see it here at the bottom of the index page: http://www.saasaholics.com/ http://www.saasaholics.com/ It also updates via ajax every 5 seconds, kinda neat. What do you think?