I recently acquired a webmaster discussion forum that had been semi-dormant for a period of time ie. it was like a wild garden where the weeds had been left unattended.
Looking back over the archives you can see that it once was quite a vibrant community, but that after the founder left to move onto other projects, or possibly a more demanding dayjob, the quality of the site declined.
Rebuilding a community on a site like that is not an easy job and I don’t expect to see tangible results for quite some time.
Over the last year or so the forum had been attacked by a lot of spammers who were posting content that drove away potentially valuable members of the community.
After moving the site and its contents to a server I controlled the first job was upgrading the forum software to the most recent version. While Vbulletin has a pretty good security track record I wouldn’t like to leave an old version “in the wild” for too long, as there are plenty of nasty little hacks that people can try.
The next thing was to install VBSeo, which is a very nice plugin for vbulletin. It helps with making “pretty” URLs and rejigs a lot of the other parts of a site’s display to make it that bit more attractive to search engine spiders.
Over the next few weeks I expect there will be quite a bit of work to be done in trying to attract new members and retain them, but it can be worth the effort. (At least I hope so!)
Another thing that will be addressed, of course, is the site’s look and feel.
Personally I can’t stand graphic heavy forums with loads of flashing icons etc., I’m much happier with a clean and simple look and feel. James from ForbairtMedia has been working on tweaking the site’s layout and design and given it a nice new logo – nothing crazy, but something quite simple and elegant.
The next big job is to see about regaining the search engines’ trust of the site. The amount of spammy junk that was there would have led to the site being heavily penalised and judging by the lack of longtail referrals my suspicions are that the site wasn’t being taken seriously by the likes of Google et al.
If anyone has any experience of rebuilding a community and would like to lend a hand please let me know 🙂
Good luck with it Michele!
I tend to find forums confusing at the best of times with poorly placed adverts getting in the way of the content and of course some truly annoying avatars and sigs.
Having said all that I quite like your layout.
Robert
Some of the gaming forums are truly horrendous 🙂
The layout on the site at the moment is being worked on, though I doubt if it will change dramatically
Why not drop over and say hi 🙂
Michele
Hi Michele
Sounds like it will turn into something good again. I’m going over to sign up now.
Jennifer
Let’s hope so 🙂
Michele
We had a similar problem with our site queerid.com back in late 2006 – basically despite enjoying a period of great success, we had a massive drop in visitors over a 3 month period, and a severe lack in new people joining.
In order to fix things, we first needed to find out what was wrong, so took a lot of time speaking to our regular members, and people who didnt use the site about what the problems were.
We discovered 3 main causes of the downturn…
1. Bebo and MySpace – a lot of our members had moved to social networking sites. Our forum based site had none of the functions they liked such as their own profile, customisation, blogs, uploading photos etc… (…the options to add these on in our software were ugly and cumbersome.)
2. Conflict on boards – there had been a number of conflicts on the site between members. Although they had been dealt with, some members felt that some people were allowed to get away with too much. The troublemakers, who were popular amongst many regular posters, were seen to get away with too much, and put people off of the boards.
3. Reliability of forum software – we’d used Snitz Forums, which suited our purposes. However, it was constantly causing problems. Adding on new modules was time consuming and often caused more problems. At one point the site was running extremely slow if at all for several weeks and the problem could not be identified. We lost a lot of regular visitors during this time.
To solve these we went back to basics, eventually relaunching in August 2007.
– We scrapped the forums software and replaced it with one that had all of the functionality our users required, such as image galleries, profiles, blogs, friends lists, guestbooks. (We developed our own in the end – after evaluating all the main ones, we realised long-term it would be better to develop our own that we could use on client projects).
– We simplified the forums software. There were so many options on the old Snitz one that no-one ever used. All the out-of-the-box products look like applications rather than friendly websites, so we tried to keep ours as straightforward looking as possible.
– We get tougher on the main troublemakers. We gave them one more chance then got rid of them for good. They all went within weeks – repeat troublemakers on boards never, ever change and do not care about ruining things for others. There was a bit of a backlash, but the vast majority of members are much happier. We’d advice going back over the forum archive to get to see if there have been issues with troublemakers previously.
There are many other things we did to woo people back too such as:
– Completely new look and feel to help draw a line under the old site. The other advice above about integrating advertising well is a good point too.
– Front page news, that highlights interesting and popular topics and splits out notices and promos from main topics.
– Getting involved in events affecting our community, and encouraging our members to do the same fosters a positive atmosphere.
It’s been a great success. It look a few months to get back on course, but the site now one year since relaunch has it’s highest traffic ever with new people joining everyday. It has a happy buzz about it. We’ve applied the lessons learnt when designing client sites such as movies.ie which use the same software and design principals.
Hope that’s not too rambling and may be of some use. Good luck with it.
Chris
Thanks for the detailed comment.
Which forum software did you switch to?
Do people actually use the blog software that comes with some of the forum software these days? I was toying with the idea of getting the blog addon for Vbulletin, but I wasn’t sure if people would actually use it
Michele
We developed our own in-house software (FruitBox) as we were also launching our own web design company at the time so realised we could possibly commercialise it. It took months to develop the first version but has paid off, as we’ve sold it to many clients already. It’s also simple for us to add on new features without the pain that comes with the likes of Snitz and Vbulletin.
There’s more info on http://fruitdesign.ie/services_web_development.asp – (please excuse our website, which is currently being redesigned!)
…as for the Blogs facilities, we’re finding this is getting more popular on QueerID, but slowly. We’re introducing some ways to highlight the blogs a bit better. I think people will use them if they know they are there, so if say the latest blog posts are shown on your homepage they will get used. If people have to find them by clicking on a top menu, or into a persons profile (as I think they are in vb) I personally don’t think they will work…
Chris
Hmmm.. I think I’ll leave the blog option alone for the moment 🙂
Michele
If you can ask the original quality contributors for their opinions on what they would like to see. Find out where they are now. Do something NEW.
Chris
I’ve already let the members know that the site is under new management etc.,
One of the original moderators is staying around, so that’s a great help 🙂
Getting back the original members at this stage won’t be easy however
Michele
Great Post Chris.
There’s one way of rebuilding the community that I’ll suggest, and that’s if you let the old community that you’re “back with a brand new rap”. Find out who the best users were, tell them whats happening, and how you’re fixing things up.
If they like the site, they’ll come back and they’ll bring a friend with them. I’d be happy to give you a hand with the site if you wanted it 🙂
Regards, Nev.
Nev
Thanks for the feedback.
I’ve already been in contact with all the “original” members, however a lot of them are no longer contactable. A few have returned, but at this stage it’s probably best to focus on attracting new users who are interested in making quality contributions (ie. not spamming 🙂 )
If you haven’t registered already, please do
Michele
Thats a bummer 🙂
The thing that I would be cautious about if I was in your position is that if an uk forum is full of irish people, it may turn off a few potential users.
On my way to register now though however. 🙂
Regards,
Nev.