Number of forum

[Spider]

Wow! 18 different forum! I thought the idea was to have fewer forum than the old site. I truly believe this is way too many - it will fragment the conversations and fragment the community, in my opinion.

Consider that each forum can have as many threads as members want, so if each of the 18 forum has only 10 active threads (and many of them will have many more than that) we will have 180 places to view topics for discussion.

Simply put, that ain't going to happen! People will gravitate to the few forum that interests them particularly and ignore the rest. = fragmented community.

I believe we need no more than 5 or 6 forum to start with. Others can be added later, as the need arises.

[vangogh]

It is more than we planned. We were still debating what the topics would be when we ended up going live earlier than planned. One of the plugins I installed made the forum visible before we intended and people started registering before we noticed.

Once people were here I figured we might as well leave things for a few days and see what happens. Ideally the forums will fill up and I think it's a good mix of topics, but you might very well be right that it's too many to start with. We'll watch and see which ones aren't filling up with posts and maybe incorporate them into others that are getting more posts.

[Evan]

I truly believe this is way too many - it will fragment the conversations and fragment the community, in my opinion.

I believe we need no more than 5 or 6 forum to start with. Others can be added later, as the need arises.

I disagree. While naturally we will be fragmented, it's very much that way in many online communities. You go to the area that interests you or that you have a question about. This requires us to have a variety of forums to engage members.

Having some central forums, such as this for feedback & suggestions, or the introductions forum, allows for us to still network and be a bit off topic. Nothing wrong with that!

[KristineS]

I like having a wider variety of forums. As time goes on, some people will gravitate to one section and some to another. I don't think having a wide variety of choices is necessarily a bad thing.

I do agree with Vangogh, if we see topics that aren't getting much love in the form of posts and new threads, we can always incorporate those into a forum that's more active.

[cbscreative]

It looks like some more opinions will help. We have only 6 categories (5 without the Forum Business section which is expected to be smaller), with what seems a sensible breakdown within those categories. The more feedback we get on this, the better, and we're interested in knowing everyone's ideas.

[Spider]

Well, I've said my piece on the subject so I won't repeat it, except to say that I noticed on the old SBF they had fewer forum than we have here (their 12 as opposed to our 18) and that clearly resulted in a fragmented community. I occasionally encountered a person I had not seen before and was surprised to see how many posts they had, only to discover that they had been posting in other forum than the ones I frequented.

As Kristine stated, some people will gravitate to one section and some to another, and we will have not one community but several. That limits getting to know each other, limits networking and reduces exchange of ideas from different vantage points.

If we do what we did over there, we are very likely to get the same results. To me, that's not an encouraging sign.

[vangogh]

I don't know if the number of forums has to mean a fragmented community, but I do understand what you mean. We all have different interests and may start gravitating toward certain areas of the forum and miss out on communicating with some members.

I think the best forums strike a balance between too many and too few sections. I see the Community Talk and Forum Business sections a bit outside this discussion. The Forum News is just so we can have communication between members and staff, which was definitely missing on the old forum. The Community Talk is really for everyone and I think no matter what our interests we'll all spend some time there welcoming new members and just having some fun and idle chat.

That really leaves us with 4 sections with 10 forums inside those sections. I think the amount of sections are good and reflect some major categories for starting and operating a business. I think it's good to separate traditional and online marketing because they are different subjects.

One advantage to having a few more forums is that you have a better chance of having a question answered by someone with more expertise. My expertise is certainly more in the online marketing section and admittedly I'll probably spend most of my time there. But it doesn't mean I won't spend my time in other sections.

I'll do what I always did, which was log in and look at the day's posts and jump into any that look interesting. I never really looked at the sections of the old forum and if you had asked me a couple of days ago I couldn't have told you what they were.

What might be best is to just leave it as is for a couple of weeks and see how the forums fill up. It's very possible that some forums will get most of the new threads while others won't have much at all. We could easily move some of the less popular categories to be sub forums of others or simply have some of the more popular ones absorb some of the smaller ones.

Part of the reason for the number of forums is that we hadn't really finalized the organization of them when we ended up being live. The forum was hidden to a degree behind an html page, but when I installed a plugin this morning the plugin unhid the forum. Before I realized it we had a couple of members so we figured why not just leave the doors open and see what happens.

We rushed to get the forum up since it seemed likely the community would just go it's own way if all we had was the old forum. It's clearly mismanaged and in a way that point is hammered home by the fact that the most popular thread there at the moment is one telling people to come over here.

I see this place as still in flux. As much work as has gone into getting the place up and running I know there's still even more to do. I don't think anything here is necessarily permanent at the moment, but in the process of growing organically.

[Spider]

Let me just get this said while it's on my mind (And then I promise I won't mention the subject again.)

Leaving he 'Community Talk' and the 'Forum Business' sections alone, as VG suggested, I suggest the following---

Starting Your Business section:

1. Business Plans and Business Ideas can be one forum. Someone with a business idea to discuss would benefit from the exposure to business plans, and someone discussing business plans could benefit from being exposed to other business ideas. Someone answering a query in either forum would be equally able to answer queries in the other. I can see no benefit in separating the two, and see a risk of someone in need being missed by someone who could help them but who didn't visit the 'right' forum.

2. Franchising is different enough to warrant a separate forum, but where do MLM and Network Marketing people converse? There are a lot of people in this form of business and they should be accommodated. I suggest this forum be 'Franchising and MLM'.' They may be different, but cross-fertilization would help everyone. In any case, thread titles would differentiate.

Financial & Legal

3. I think this section needs only two forum - one for financial matters and one for legal matters. Each forum allows multiple threads so topics won't get mixed up. Financing, capital, cashflow, accounting and taxes will be identified by the thread title and do not need to be separated into separate forum.

Marketing

4. Marketing is marketing. There are different kinds and different influences and different elements, but to have eight (8) different forum for marketing is ludicrous, in my opinion. Is there any marketer who will frequent all eight? Is there any casual marketer, or someone for whom marketing is only part of their concern, going to visit all eight? Who will know which of the eight forum they should pose their question?

5. There should be one section for marketing, and there should be 3 forum - Advertising, Public Relations, Website Management. All the other things mentioned, like Guerrilla Marketing, increasing sales, copywriting, internet marketing, seo, blogging, and some not mentioned like design and layout and testing, are all covered by the three forum proposed. Differentiation of topics with be made by reading the thread titles.


In this effort to cover all the topics that need to be covered in a Business discussion board, we seem to have forgotten that each forum is further broken up into threads - individual discussions. The forum need to be broad enough to encourage discussion, not so narrow as to reduce discussion.

My suggestions above reduce the number of forum from 18 to 11 - still too many, in my view, but I'm trying to be nice!!!

[cbscreative]

Frederick, I think that was well said, and I especially like how you gave specific suggestions. I do agree that when you think about it, marketing is marketing. They are interdependent on each other. If a traditional mailing does not utilize promoting a web site, then they are not working in harmony and that would be unwise. Because of this interdependence, I think you raise a valid reason for keeping them together.

I am reminded of the fact that the days of traditional marketing alone are numbered. Those who are not marketing online in some capacity are increasingly losing business to those who are. This trend in business would also support your point. I would like to see other perspectives from business people here too, but I believe we can reduce down the categories and I definitely value this type of honest feedback. The fact that we can have subcategories in any section needs to be considered too.

On the other side of this issue is the fact that to combine any of these forums is fairly easy, and so it gets condensed easily. If it's decided later that it needs to be broken up, moving everything around is much more time consuming and diffifcult. We don't want to be too hasty with making these kinds of decisions, but we also want the forum to serve everyone's needs as best it can.

[vangogh]

Frederick we did reorganize things a little bit. We moved a couple of forums to subforums and removed a couple others. There are less forums than there were now.

We also moved all the marketing forums into one marketing section, but left website management and blogging in a separate section with a new name.

It's not quite as small as you were thinking, but it's less forums than before. And remember we'll still in flux here. We want to leave some things just to see how people respond to them. It's not that we don't want to change things around, but we do want to test a few things sometimes before we make a final decision about them.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[orion_joel]

I do not think that the number of forums is excessive just that it needs to be something monitored, and overtime if some forums are getting less posts, aybe should be merged with others to try and concentrate the discussion.

However, this is really something that over time may work out and give growth to better seperation of topics that could be borderline in one topic.

[vangogh]

That's how I was viewing it too. We didn't want to have too many forums at first, but we also didn't want to confine it to a few. I figured over a week or two we'd get a better feel for where people were posting and what areas could be absorbed by others.

I think Frederick was right about there being so many marketing forums. I think there is a difference between online and offline marketing and both deserve their own space, but it was a lot of different forums to start with. Moving a few around and turning some into subforums cleaned it up a bit.

In time and assuming we have enough people contributing here I can see where all the forums can be expanded into more topics.

[orion_joel]

I think that it can be a double edged sword. On one side, having to many forums can mean it takes longer to look busy and populated, while not having enough variety can mean some things can get mixed which may not always work together.

However i believe having to many and working them down over time is potentially better then adding more as needed, it saves the confusion when you may have a marketing forum, and then split it into a traditional marketing forum and internet marketing forum, where people will get confused about which one to post some questions in, as one or the other will contain the posts from before which will be mixed.

I cannot imagine it would be a major thing to merge two forums, where as splitting one into two or more could be a lot of work if you go about moving the posts to there respective forums, of course depending on what stage this happened and how may posts there are.

[degadar]

I just click on 'new posts' and all the posts are automagically in one place. doesn't make any difference to me how many or how categories there are.

[Steve B]

I used to not like there being so many categories either - but now I do like degadar does and it's a moot point to me now.

[Leatherneck]

I have belonged too several communities over the past and the amount of topics doesn't bother me. I usually look through all of them and if I can contribute I will, if not it no biggy. Just my oppinion.

[vangogh]

I do the same thing with the new posts too. After awhile I hardly even realize what the categories are and just respond to threads I subscribed to and based on the titles of new ones.

[cbscreative]

I cannot imagine it would be a major thing to merge two forums, where as splitting one into two or more could be a lot of work if you go about moving the posts to there respective forums, of course depending on what stage this happened and how may posts there are.
You're exactly right on that point, Joel. I also do like many others here, I check New Posts and the number of different categories has never bothered me. While we're trying to find the happiest balance for everyone here, all this feedback is very much appreciated.

[Spider]

The problem I have with 'New Posts' is they disappear from the list once you have viewed them. Then, if you want to visit one of them again, you have to know which thread or which forum it was in, otherwise you will not find it.

I also go first to New Posts but I like to read all the posts I want to read first, then go back and answer the ones I want to answer - but I can't find them then, because they have disappeared. You have to go digging through the forum to find the ones you're looking for. The more forum, the more digging, and I usually leave before I have answered.

By far the most productive for all concerned is to activate the Top Ten Stats which includes Newest Members, Top Posters and Latest Posts as the first section. It is most productive because then you would have New Posts, Today's Posts and Latest Posts, all available and everyone could work SBF as they find most suitable.

If I have not been clear and you are interested in seeing this in operation, check this vB board - Success Forum and Motivation - SuccessVibe.com (http://www.successvibe.com/forum/)

[cbscreative]

I think that is very helpful, thank you, Frederick. I don't want to sound too political just to say we will "take this under advisement," but actually will, and I appreciate specific examples like this. This is new territory for us, but we did know that the SBF needed to pay attention to what the members were saying, and all voices are being heard. As we already pointed out, it's easier to combine categories than to separate them later, so we are being careful, yet we are listening. When you include examples like this, that is extremely helpful, and I appreciate getting all opinions.

We're working out a lot of things right now, so little by little, we'll get there. And even when we think we're there, the feedback is still important. One reason we're all here is that the old SBF was not listening. None of us want to see that mistake repeated.

[vangogh]

Frederick the top 10 hacks isn't a simple setting change. It's code that needs to be added to the vBulletin application. We'll have to decide whether or not to add it, but assuming we decide it's something we want to add we would first need to look through the code to ensure it doesn't open security holes or slow down performance of the forum as a whole.

It's not a simple turn this on kind of thing.

The one thing you seem to really want is the way to view the days posts. That functionality is already here. Look under Quick Links in the main navigation and you'll see the option for Today's Posts. That will show you all the latest posts and they won't disappear.

If you want to see the top posts click on the Member List link at the top and then click on the Posts link in that page. That will sort all members in order of their number of posts.

The newest member is always displayed at the bottom of the home page. I'm not really sure what the value is in knowing who are the 10 most recent members.

[Spider]

I don't necessarily want Top Posters or Newest Members, VG - I mentioned them purely to describe the section I was seeing. It is the Latest Posts that I find so useful and felt others would, too. Neither the New Posts nor Today's Posts does the job.

I didn't realize this was a hack - I thought it was simply click a box and off we go. Guess we'll have to make do with what we've got, then. You have more important things to do, I'm sure.

Thanks for letting me know.


I just went to sbf.COM and the spammers seem to have taken over totally already. There's nobody to have a conversation with to keep the 'Thanks' thread alive, other than talk to myself. I have a feeling any of the old hands who are not here already aren't going back there anyway.

[cbscreative]

Vangogh raises a good point. I asked him to activate the checkmark icon that shows the threads we are "subscribed" to as a quick visual. This is now active. He warned me that it could slow perfomance. I can see why. The system has to now cross reference any thread you are subscribed to before displaying the page. Although I can't claim "slow" response, I have noticed that it creates a lag in the previous performance of the database. The point being that some features come at a cost of slower performance.

[cbscreative]

Thanks for checking with the old SBF, your findings are not real surprising. That's sad, but that's also why we are all here.

[vangogh]

Frederick the last posts thing is here. Like I said it's under Quick Links > Today's Posts. I'm pretty sure that's what you're looking for. It's the same thing the old forum had as Today's Posts, though it's one more click to get there.

When we get to customizing the template I'd like to move that out so it's a link in the main navigation at the top and only requires the one click, but it might be awhile before we get there.

@Steve - That's the issue with some of the functionality. Most of it is going to require one or a series of queries from the database so there's a trade off between the feature and performance. Sometimes it's worth it and other times we have to opt for the performance. Otherwise we have to pay more each month for an upgraded server.

[Spider]

Frederick the last posts thing is here. Like I said it's under Quick Links > Today's Posts. I'm pretty sure that's what you're looking for. It's the same thing the old forum had as Today's Posts, though it's one more click to get there....It's not the same as 'Latest Posts,' VG, and for me 'Today's Posts' doesn't do the job. But never mind. I'll work with what we've got.

(In case you're interested -- 'Latest Posts' is a condensed version of 'New Posts' that don't disappear when read. 'Todays Posts' are just that - today's posts and not the posts that came in since I was last on board, so when you sign off at 10pm and log back on at 6am, all the posts that came in between 10pm and midnight are missed. So, Latest Posts, New Posts and Todays Posts are three different things.)

[vangogh]

Was latest posts being used on the old forum? I thought it was always Today's Posts there?

[Spider]

Was latest posts being used on the old forum? I thought it was always Today's Posts there?The old SBF was not using Latest Posts. It displays New Posts and Today's Posts only.

Latest Posts can be seen in use at SuccessVibe.com (http://www.successvibe.com/forum/)

[vangogh]

I didn't think it was on the old forum, but thought I'd check just in case I missed it.