I’ve built a few large forums over the past 6-8 years. I took one forum from scratch up a little past two million posts with about 125,000 users, and I have another one that’s getting close to the 100,000 user mark. However, I also have about a half-dozen small forums that are just getting off the ground. I thought I’d share a few tips on how to effectively manage small forums without spending too much time on each one.
The key to building a successful forum is to treat every new member like gold. In particular, if they post something you need to reply. In addition, you need to quickly moderate any spam that comes your way. As a forum gets larger, these problems become easier to manage because you have a lot of users to welcome newbies and a lot of moderators. Early on, though, it can be tough.
I employ two simple techniques to help me out:
- RSS Feeds. Almost every forum package available will push an RSS feed of new threads. In vBulletin, for example, you just append “external.php?type=RSS2” to your URL and it becomes an RSS feed! Here is an example. I put all of my forum RSS feeds into Google Reader so I can keep up with them. That way, I can quickly respond to new threads and clean out any spam without having to visit each site all the time.
- E-mail Notification. This is even easier. When I respond to a thread in one of my forums, I almost always enable e-mail notification for that topic. This sends new information to me, instead of making me go out there and find it.
Again, as your forum grows you’ll probably need to scale back on these activities and focus more on finding quality moderators to assist you. In the meantime, though, those two simple tips can help save you a lot of time.
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