[webproducers] Re: Forums

Some additional questions for you to ponder-- 
 
* what are some of the moderation difficulties & other problems you're hoping 
to avoid?
* are your forums the only "community" feature on your site or do you need 
something that will integrate w/an existing member database and other 
interactive tools?
* do you want something hosted on your site or would an ASP work for you?
 
As Cortney mentioned, migrating forums is no small task. You might want to 
consider posing this question to the "onlinefacilitation" yahoo group too -- 
lots of good folks w/this specific experience. 
 
Identifying your "requirments" for the new system is key, and I've found one of 
the best ways to do that is to simply observe what I like & dislike about the 
software used in the various forums where I participate.... and make a list 
from there. If appropriate, you might even want to poll your members for a 
"wish list" -- this is, after all, their space, and finding ways for them to 
contribute to the process will go a long way towards making this transition as 
smooth as possible (you know, make 'em feel appreciated & validate their 
importance in the process)
 
There are good quality, inexpensive packages out there, most of which are 
highly customizeable and fairly scaleable too. Similary, you'll find lots of 
great freebies too including these yahoo groups and prospero forums. It really 
depends on whether you need control over your membership database as well as 
your needs regarding branding/advertising (prospero has a private label option 
for a premium). One of the advantages to using services such as yahoo or 
prospero is that you'll have more avenues for driving traffic to your forums 
through their (rather large) membership databases.
 
If it'll help, I'd be happy to share a list of board/chat requirements I've 
used in the past--might be helpful as a starting point. let me know.

Cortney Sellers <cortney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hey,

A couple of questions to consider:

* What kind of community do you have or are you building? Help, Dialogue,
Hobbyist, News, Etc?
* What features do you want from a forum - from both an end-user and a
moderator position?
* What type of system are you using now?

There is a lot to consider when migrating forums. If you'd like to discuss
this further, please feel free to contact me offline for just honest
brainstorming and potential solutions. 

Cortney

-----Original Message-----
From: webproducers-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:webproducers-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of vera-jayne nwajiaku
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 6:45 AM
To: webproducers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [webproducers] Forums

Hi

Were in the process of changing our forums - the existing forums are very
difficult to moderate which has caused us no end of problems. Were
re-launching our site at the end of the year and hope to have a more
manageable forum solution. Does anyone have any good research around forums
or experience of good products on the market? How do you evaluate what a
good forum is?

Thanks

Vee


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