jono.me

Regaining control of forum

// February 24th, 2011 // australianwebmaster.com

As I mentioned in my previous post, statistically my australianwebmaster.com forum was going really well, however diving in to the statistics showed a different story.

For me the goal was always to increase post activity. During the building stage I always aimed for each area of the forum to have a “last post” either showing Today or Yesterday. After a while the site activity built and I had met this goal – in fact I was receiving up to 200 posts a day. The problem was that many of these posts were of low quality.

This meant that the people I actually WANT on the forum were frustrated by the crappy posts and simply gave up. This is not what I wanted.

To solve the problem I had to make the site less appealing to people just wanting backlinks. I figured I could either make external links nofollow or remove signatures.

I didn’t like the idea of making the site a nofollow so all I could do was remove signatures, however I decided to provide users with a backlink on their web site as listed on the profile. I felt that this was a good compromise – I could limit links to 1 per user. Also showing their link wasn’t too complicated so it was fairly straight forward to change.

As soon as I announced the changes I had a few people come back and state that they thought the change was a great idea and confirmed that the reason why the no longer visited the forum was because of the low quality posts. So I was happy.

I did however then get a few negative comments.

I decided to re-instate signatures however only for people who were contributing to the forum.

The problem is how do you do this. Any system that relies on post count is encouraging people to make posts – and this generally means low quality posts. Post length was also not appropriate – I have people quoting other web sites (eg. articles) which were nice and long however doesn’t mean that they were a “quality” post.

The solution I’ve implemented for now is to make people apply for a signature. Not too sure how it will go but I think it’s worth a try.