Biggest Forum Mistakes

[Shawn Gossman]

What has been the biggest mistake you've made with your forum?

What did you learn from your mistake?

[Gaz]

What has been the biggest mistake you've made with your forum?

What did you learn from your mistake?

A few things spring to mind

Not upgrading the site to 5 or 6 a lot earlier. The lack of a mobile app really hurt the site
Not going all out to make new members feel welcome and engaged when the forum was really humming.
Not finding that point of difference in terms of content early enough.

The lesson learned is don't take things for granted and it you're standing still as a forum then you're actually losing ground.
Embrace members who are willing to help the site along.

[Shawn Gossman]

At least you can remedy most of the points you have listed above.

Especially with onboarding. You can definitely start changing that now.

[Gaz]

At least you can remedy most of the points you have listed above.

Especially with onboarding. You can definitely start changing that now.

Spot on.
I've had a few longer term forum members step up and go out of their way to engage new members and while it's early days it seems to be working nicely.
We've picked up about 8 really good contributors and another 6 look likely to become regular contributors....well fingers crossed
What isn't really surprising is the number of people who join and never respond to the welcome message that I send them.
This seems to be the biggest challenge for my forum over the last few years.
One of the constant complaints was the forum software but now that has been addressed it might help identify the real reasons. I'd say people see themselves as time poor.
I can get new members who follow the club to join but the success rate of turning them into genuine contributors is probably 1 in 8 so it's a lot of work for a smaller return on effort.

So with the ease of VB6, good content in the discussions and a vastly improved onboarding approach for new member, and returning ones for that matter, it will be interesting to see how far we can push it.

I keep getting invites to participate in popular Fantasy Football Podcasts (Australian Rules Footy) and while I enjoy my anonymity I'm considering giving that a go because it would validate the forum a bit more.