Reviving a forum?

Sipex

When I first started posting on forums I joined a bustling internet community for a webcomic we all liked. Now, we came to know each other quite well and went through stuff (help threads, a random forum lock for a year by the creator of said webcomic, trolls, usual forum stuff).

Some of us have left but there are still some of us around and we get new members every once in a while but nobody really posts anymore, they just don't seem into it. The webcomic still posts but we've all grown quite cynical about it.

I'm an active poster who thrives on discussion, it's one of the reasons I started posting on these forums, but I would really like to get my 'home' forum bustling again. I know they can do it, just recently the forum was to be closed and it absolutely exploded with activity with posters coming out of the wood work defending it and such (we kept the forum alive, the admins were touched by one particular member's plea).

But now I've tried everything, I try starting topics about once a week and nothing seems to stick. Everyone gets a post or two in and loses interest.

So, tell me H/A, is there anything I can do to breathe life into my old forum?

edit: To clarify I've tried the following
- Common interest topics
- News topics
- Forum games
- Bitching topics
- Help topics
- Lets Play topics

FyreWulff

Well, can you at least.. screencap it and anonymize it a bit? It's a bit hard to help if we don't know what you are dealing with

The first order of business is to pare down the amount of available subforums. I don't know how many are posting, but if it's in the double digits then you only need one, maybe two forums.

Rubix42

I just watched the Play magazine forums fizzle and die. Once the main members start going dark, it is really hard to spark life back in the forum.

I think it's like watching the honeymoon phase of a relationship. Person meets forum, makes some posts, becomes comfortable in the relationship. Slowly posts less and less and before you know it, the only time you post is after a big fight or traumatic event. Eventually you try to find a new forum to post in, you know, trying to recapture that glorius feeling of the first post:winky:

Even though I went for humor, it is a valid comparison.

DirtyDirtyVagrant

Yeah, it is.

I remember seeing Tube give some insight into forum management on 1up or something, although he was more touching on the disciplinary aspects of it. You might try asking him.

FyreWulff

Also kill megathreads.

While they may seem cool, they are one of the biggest off-putters to new members ever, because instead of a bunch of topics being bumped up on the forum and looking active, you end up with one thread basically stuck to the top of the forum and threads from a year or two ago on page 1 sitting under it.

I recently looked at other comic forums, and Real Life Comics' forum is now suffering from this.

So

- pare down subforums
- encourage new topics over posting endlessly in old ones
- identify habitual trollers and smack them with a newspaper
- clear out old and ancient stickies that are no longer relevant. At most you should have 2.
- Consider using the forum's email abilities to send a mass email once you finish the changes, asking everyone to check it out.

Sipex

We do have a pretty big offending megathread. It was supposed to be our last topic before the forum was removed permenantly so we just pushed it to get as many pages in as possible.

Trolls aren't a problem anymore, so that's nothing big.

We do have an IRC channel though (one I don't go on because of work) which probably kills a lot of potential in-forum conversation as well.

Thanks!

Backstop

Start a regularly occurring feature thread that everyone can chime in on, so that they at least check in for that and then they spend a little time on the other threads.

Sipex

We have that already actually. The comic updates 5 days a week, Mon-Fri so we create a new thread for each comic and discuss it there. It's one of the reasons the forum still has any activity at all.

Backstop

I mean something independent of the comic. Like over at Ars Technica I used to have a weekly 8 questions thread, nothing to do with the news posts, and I tried to make them open-ended to spark a little conversation.

Not that the Ars forum was ever really struggling of course.

MoSiAc

This forum I used to follow for English teachers in the part of Japan I lived (close knit group) was pretty slow until I started having fight threads like Hulk Hogan vs Incredible Hulk and silly things like that to get people talking, and then Friday sing a long.

Start the lyrics to a terrible song that everyone knows and see how many people post the rest.
These really only work if you know the people that post will find it comical. We also got bored around end of March cause no classes but having to be at work so anything to lighten the day was nice.