Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 | Author: jason
Starting a new online forum from an existing mailing list is not easy. You have to convince some number of people (10? 20?) to stop simply receiving content, and to actively go out to $WEBSITE and get the content that way.
And people are lazy.
So, when the forum went 2-3 months without anyone but me (the admin) and spammers logging in, I just removed permissions to the directory, and went about my business.
And about a 8-12 months after that, there’s now a discussion on the mailing list which needs a forum (because most people don’t care about your Illuminati theories… kthxbai) I get to go resurrect upgrade and clean up the forum.
If I knew the formula to make all this work, I could make big money in a social networking company.
Category: Rants
You need a facilitator(not me. I can’t log on at work). Someone to keep the conversation going. Several someone’s actually.
And maybe you could do some research on how some of the more successful forums got started. LiveJournal might be a good one to look at since they were around when dinosaurs roamed the earth and dial-up was king.
I think that if we can get 10-15 people going there regularly and actually commenting/starting new topics, it might go somewhere. The trick is getting people going. Andrew Martin said in IM yesterday that he had lots of illuminati thoughts, and that he’d share them last night. But followthrough, as always, is a problem.