Russell Beattie put together a great piece about the value of forums and explores some of the behaviors on larger forums, such as 4chan.org.

http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/my-fascination-with-web-forums

Russell talks of the importance at times of anonymous (guest) posts - like their low barrier to entry. The drawback are the spammers that take advantage of the system. That’s why we’re building out anti-spam support, similar to what exists on services like gmail and wordpress to keep the forum ‘doors’ open but block the spam with some tough bouncers.

Another interesting post of his, is the concept of ‘no spam or trolls‘ on twitter, thanks to the one-way friending functionality. This is close to something we’ll be building out around lefora as we’ll be adding support for ‘fans’ and ‘foes’ later this year. With the idea that posts from your foes will be collapsed automatically to help prevent the incited arguments by trolls. We hope to be able to extract community level ranking out of this as well (a person frequently marked as a foe or with many thumb down remarks.)

Well, according to  Wordle, the fun toy for generating tag clouds on websites:

That’s a question we get often and it can be hard to quantify. But Paul found an interesting chart on Forrester that shows almost one-third of all U.S. Internet users read online forums, that comes in to a close 2nd for all online ‘participation’ activities, with video watching just 1 percentage point above that. What’s interesting, is that reading forums, and posting in forums, come in close to the top positions respectively for reading and posting anything online.

In the U.S., more people read online forums or groups than visit social networking sites, read review sites, or read blogs (comparing them individually).

More people contribute to online forums or groups than comment on blogs, upload photos, publish a blog, or edit wikis (again, comparing them individually).

Full chart. Or checkout the book, Groundswell.

The author of “Managing Online Forums“, Patrick O’Keefe sent us a copy to review. It’s a fantastic book for any forum admin (or anybody running an online community for that matter), and I highly recommend it. Patrick dives deep into all aspects of running a forum, from creating it, to promoting it, to fostering the community.

Patrick sat down to answer some questions we wanted to share with our community.

—

Patrick, you start off with common ways forums get started, such as launching a new stand-alone community, to adding a forum on an existing site. On Lefora, we’ve seen our fastest growing communities are forums that launch alongside an existing community. Do you have 3 short tips for an admin launching a stand-alone new community to foster that initial growth?

1. Launch with activity. Before your site goes live, get some friends and/or interested people together and have them start discussing the topic so that you actually have something going on when it comes time to launch.
2. Make it as easy as possible for people to find you. Choose a domain name that is easy to remember and spell. Spell words correctly, try to avoid numbers, don’t use dashes and register a .com if at all possible. Make it so that search engines can access your content. Don’t put obstacles in your way unneccessarily. You don’t need that.
3. Finally, don’t get caught up in what other, bigger forums in your subject arena are doing. I’ve known administrators who were far too worried about who they perceived as competition. Focus on yourself and be the best that you can be.

You talk about ‘Developing Guidelines’ in your book, dedicating a chapter to it. Do you think setting (and following) these guidelines are more important in an early stage forums or a larger established forum

I think it’s very important for both. You want to set guidelines and policies as early as you can to set the tone for everything that happens later and to ensure that your community gets started on the right track. Guidelines are sort of a vision statement. They speak to who you are, who you want to be and what your community is all about.

Guidelines are an essential to moderation. You can’t remove posts without having policies in place or it’ll seem like you are pulling imaginary standards out of your head. Discretion is a part of moderating a community, but documented policy is what makes discretion possible. It’s always harder to add guidelines later, than it is to start with them

Another chapter is dedicated on how to Promote Your Community and the work involved, which is a popular question we hear. With regards to cross promoting communities, how has your success been?

I’d say it has been successful, but that’s subjective. I’ve had people who were members at multiple forums that I managed. I’ve had people that were on staff at more than one of my forums at a time, as well. We do a good amount of cross promotion between the sites that are in my network.

You talked about creating a ‘link to us’ page for graphics and active topics for members to link to the forum. With the ability to embed flash widgets on pages around the web, do you have any new thoughts on useful widgets for promoting

I haven’t done much with widgets or with Flash. I think that, in general, providing promotional avenues like that can only be a good thing. It could be in the form of a profile widget, a list of the latest topics or some sort of other community driven content, but it gives people more of an opportunity to promote you in a healthy way, on their own terms, and that can only be good.

In your chapter on managing your staff, you have some great guidelines and anecdotes. If you were to place a value on the staff, such as hours of week saved, or percentage of time saved, what would that be?

I don’t know if I’d be able to place a specific, time based value on my staff. It varies and it’d be hard to even ballpark it. But, a productive staff is vital to the success of any sizable community. A well trained staff is extremely valuable, ensuring that your community receives the proper amount of coverage. One thing I have said before is that you want to be able to go on a vacation and not have to worry about your forums (the whole time, anyway). In other words, you don’t always have to be there, which is important.

On public forums, it can be difficult to ban members, as they can easily come back with new accounts, what have your experiences been with this?

I don’t think it’s all that difficult. You don’t really have any other options, when it comes down to it. I don’t ban people - people ban themselves. I don’t want to ban anyone, but I’m forced to. Some people do come back, as you say, but you just have to keep your eyes open and ban people as they pop up. Most people aren’t all that crafty, but if someone is able to sneak back in, there isn’t much you can do until they slip up and provide you with something that indicates that they have previously been banned.

I’ve had people come back for more than a year and a dozen accounts before. They were persistent, but they were banned again and again and, eventually, they stopped. One thing that I know is that my will to protect my community will always be greater than anyone else’s will to harm it. You may cause a little bit of noise, but we’ll remove it, you’ll be banned and, at the end of the day, we’ll move forward. If you want to waste your life playing with that process, that’s your choice, but you’re not going to be allowed back on any of my communities.

I think that creative solutions can also come into play with repeat offenders. A troll hack where you can mark a member as a troll is a good option. Basically, instead of being banned, they’ll just receive a terribly degraded site performance that amounts to simulated downtime. They won’t be able to post or anything, but they’ll still be able to browse - when it works. It’s not something that should be pulled out quickly - it should only be reserved for those that have made it clear that they do not wish to respect your ban. But, creative solutions like that can work well.

Were there any counter intuitive lessons you learned when running a forum?

That’s hard for me to say. I believe we learn from experience - good and bad - and that makes us better. And that’s where the book can come in, really, in that it gives you 10 years worth of experience in 300 pages. Experience that you can learn from and use as a base of knowledge as you grow your own. Everyone makes mistakes, but you learn from them and you get better.

We really agree with your comment on members that want to leave a community - they should be able to remove their personal information, but the posts should stay, as the posts are part of the community (and people have discussed around them). Have you had many encounters with members repeatedly asking for this?

Sure, I’ve had a number of people request this sort of thing over the years. You just have to do what you can to limit damage to your community. If you allow someone to come in, make a bunch of posts and then have them removed, that is damaging the community. You just can’t have it.

Thank you Patrick O’Keefe for your insightful responses. www.managingonlineforums.com

We all had a bet around the team when we would hit 10,000, and we beat every one of our guesstimates by a few days.

Sam was the closest, so we all owe him a pint of beer.

Andrew has been working on a nifty little visualization of forum activity.  Click the image to see it full size.

• Each arc is a forum.  It arcs from its creation to its last real post to date.  Top vs. bottom arcs don’t mean anything, it’s just so they all fit.
• Arc height is proportional to the number of posts.
• Arc width is proportional to the number of members.
• Green circles are the start of forums, red circles indicate the last post date.

Full size.

Robot Scoble swung into our office today to interview Paul and get a demo of our new service. He was impressed with our new theme color editor, which is a simple slider that allows you to adjust all the colors in your forum with a simple drag of the mouse.

Watch the Interview

and watch the Demo

Last week we went live with a ‘public launch’. As many forum admins may be aware, we had a private period before this where we were keeping quiet to the ’silicon valley’ circle what we were building out. Our private period drew potential forum admins to our service via google ads. This plan worked very well for us, because it allowed us to closely work with an active and engaged community before publicly launching. Their feedback directly contributed to the product you see today, and the feedback we’re receiving today is contributing to the product you’ll see tomorrow.

Our official public launch on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 drew a lot of attention from blogs and a few news outlets, such as the San Francisco Chronicle. Some of the larger blogs included TechCrunch and c|net’s Webware.

We had 500 forums created within just the first 24 hours of our launch. TechCrunch was a large slice of the pie driving traffic to our site, with almost 24% of referrals coming from TechCrunch. Another, slightly smaller, slice of that pie came from various RSS readers (17% Google Reader, 3% netvibes, and 2% Bloglines - pretty easy to see who’s dominating the online feedreader market.)

.

Celebrations?

As with any good news, we take that as a time to celebrate and enjoy life. By Wednesday night, we were all starving, so only one cuisine could feed 7 hungry men, Churrascaria (aka Brazilian Barbecue).

.

Earlier this week, we spent time reviewing our past progress and how we want to keep moving forums forward. We figured the best place to get our product ideas flowing, would be where one of San Francisco’s best beers gets their product flowing - The Anchor Steam Brewery.

For more photos, check out some of these linked below:

• Team photo one & two.
• Moustaches for all.
• Anchor Steam closeup.

We believe that forums are essential to online communities. lefora was started to bring forums up to speed with the latest ’social’ and ‘technological’ trends seen across many of the ‘web2.0′ sites that have popped up over the past few years (has it really been that long?)

The existing forum market is huge, however the options that exists for everyday people are pretty slim. You pretty much have phpBB and derivatives, vBulletin, InvisionPowerBoards, or something tacked onto a larger service (like facebook’s groups). We want to change all that with an offering that is simple to use, fun to use, and makes life easy for admins and moderators. And that’s why we created lefora forums.

This blog will try to focus on a few things:

• Where are forums headed?
• What makes for a successful forum?
• How do forums enable “community”?

We’ll talk about our own vision, but we’ll also bring in forum admins from across the web to get their take as well.

Remember, forums pre-date the web, but they don’t have to feel that way.