Nope, I'm not talking about IHB forums. I want to share something that I have seen in the past with the hope that people will recognize a potential problem exists and prevent this new forum from going down a path I have seen before.
Back in the late 90's, overclocking computer components was popular among a certain segment of the geek population. I was part of that segment, and in 1996/97, Tom's Hardware ( www.tomshardware.com ) was the place to go for people who wanted to get the most out of their hardware.
In addition to having what we would now call a blog, Tom also had a message forum. Given that everyone was still trying to figure out how to monetize the internet, Tom didn't realize the potential to generate revenue that his forum possessed. He hosted his forum on Delphi Forums "for free", and they generated revenue from his traffic. Over time Tom realized that he could easily offset forum hosting costs by advertising, so he severed his relationship with Delphi.
But there was already a large community who preferred the frames based interface of Delphi forums as opposed to the threaded interfaces that most forums software uses, so Delphi was able to keep the community that Tom's Hardware built up by renaming the forum to Extreme Computing. Tom built a new community, but his old community stuck together as a totally unmoderated community.
Over time, changes happened with Delphi management, threads in our community were deleted, certain popular forum members were banned, and other internet offenses occured, so another member and I got together and wrote a forum package that was a clone of the Delphi forums interface. We hosted it on our own servers, and had complete freedom of expression, and though I was technically a moderator of this community, it was still a free speech zone.
In the beginning, the forum we created would generate around 5,000 posts a day. But over time that number started dropping. I haven't checked back in over a year, but it's lucky to get 50 posts a day today.
My analysis of the root cause of the problem is that as life happens, people tend to drift away from communities like this.
If a community has something that can draw new members in, then it will continue to remain a robust community.
If a community forum has nothing to draw new members in, it will eventually die.
You have some momentum here right now. But if this remains a single stand-alone forum, then eventually everyone will drift away as life happens.
My suggestion would be to find ways to draw new people to the community. A blog would be the perfect vehicle, and given the domain name, it wouldn't necessarily have to be centered entirely around real estate.
My personal situation wouldn't allow me to contribute to something like this on a regular basis, but I just thought I would throw the idea out to see what others think.
Back in the late 90's, overclocking computer components was popular among a certain segment of the geek population. I was part of that segment, and in 1996/97, Tom's Hardware ( www.tomshardware.com ) was the place to go for people who wanted to get the most out of their hardware.
In addition to having what we would now call a blog, Tom also had a message forum. Given that everyone was still trying to figure out how to monetize the internet, Tom didn't realize the potential to generate revenue that his forum possessed. He hosted his forum on Delphi Forums "for free", and they generated revenue from his traffic. Over time Tom realized that he could easily offset forum hosting costs by advertising, so he severed his relationship with Delphi.
But there was already a large community who preferred the frames based interface of Delphi forums as opposed to the threaded interfaces that most forums software uses, so Delphi was able to keep the community that Tom's Hardware built up by renaming the forum to Extreme Computing. Tom built a new community, but his old community stuck together as a totally unmoderated community.
Over time, changes happened with Delphi management, threads in our community were deleted, certain popular forum members were banned, and other internet offenses occured, so another member and I got together and wrote a forum package that was a clone of the Delphi forums interface. We hosted it on our own servers, and had complete freedom of expression, and though I was technically a moderator of this community, it was still a free speech zone.
In the beginning, the forum we created would generate around 5,000 posts a day. But over time that number started dropping. I haven't checked back in over a year, but it's lucky to get 50 posts a day today.
My analysis of the root cause of the problem is that as life happens, people tend to drift away from communities like this.
If a community has something that can draw new members in, then it will continue to remain a robust community.
If a community forum has nothing to draw new members in, it will eventually die.
You have some momentum here right now. But if this remains a single stand-alone forum, then eventually everyone will drift away as life happens.
My suggestion would be to find ways to draw new people to the community. A blog would be the perfect vehicle, and given the domain name, it wouldn't necessarily have to be centered entirely around real estate.
My personal situation wouldn't allow me to contribute to something like this on a regular basis, but I just thought I would throw the idea out to see what others think.
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