Advice needed

I run a forum about the holistic medicine in Croatian language. We have many different topics about different types of natural treatments, herbs, supplements and so on.

However, recently I started noticing that many members of my forum spend most of their time in the "Water Cooler" forum, writing about sport, music, love, humor ets.

Therefore I have got an idea to expand this one forum into a Category, by adding such forums as Love, Sports, Humor ets.

From one side, I understand that this is a bad idea. My forum belongs to a certain niche, and I should stick to it.

From another side, this new category could be interesting to people, who love our forum and our community, but dont have much to say about the alternative medicine.

What do you think?

 

My advice to you would be to ask your member and see what they think.

 

Good idea,

 

When it comes to things like that I love to hear the community feedback. The way I look at running a forum is this:

The community is the forum. I try to make every decision with the good of the community in mind and make sure what I'm doing is for the good of the community. Some things I end up doing just because I can lol, but, when making changes I prefer to solicit community feedback. I actually have a post about my philosophy on running one of my forums that I just started out here and I personally think all forums should be run like this lol.

 

I agree that the community is the heart of the forum. I will definitely ask them. Thank you for advice!

 

Active communities have a tendency to evolve over time. Sometimes the niche you begin as isn't the niche you end up as - if you're happy to add these areas and your members want them, then run with it. If it doesn't work, you can always remerge them into a single forum again, after all

 

At a glance, you have way too many forums. I don't speak Croatian, but more forums makes the site look empty, and reduces activity by requiring more clicks. You might not think it bothers members, but the effect is notable. Heck I got a solid few percent just by raising the posts per page to 25.

I usually break down forums like so:
1) An announcement or announcement archives forum. Even if your software supports global announcements, it's good to stick these somewhere.
2) A site support forum. I prefer to label this simply and obviously - questions and suggestions, ask anything, HELP! etc.
3) Purpose forums - enough to cover what your site is about and no more, but certainly no less.
4) General off-topic forum.
5) Forum games/socializing forum

This doesn't count hidden forums for moderators, a trash forum, etc. of course.

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Be careful with asking the community about everything. People aren't always aware of all factors involved, plus you can end up with the design by committee effect.

Not saying it's bad, you are serving your community after all, but as long as you think of it that way - service - you should be fine.

 

Wow, I've never read somebody who thinks so much like myself in this aspect. I rarely make changes (especially large changes) that impact the community without their input or advice. The reason for this is that I have often realized that something that excites me, or I think is a good idea, may be a complete turn-off to my members, or my simply not interest them whatsoever.

Although you (well, we - community administrators) may think something is certainly worth doing, the true way of knowing is to seek the community's feedback. If they don't want it, why give it to them? If they do want, it why not give it to them?

In short: Administrators and the communities they administrate don't always think on the same wavelength.


Note that I am not trying to imply that all decisions should be made by the community; as administrators, we have more things to keep in mind when making decisions, whereas the community keeps just one thing in mind: themselves. So we sometimes need to make choices regardless of the community's input.

P.S.: I like your idea of publicly posting your philosophy; I think that gives members a stronger sense of 'security' and backing.

Yep; I even recently started a discussion on this: http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/ge...s-you-forum-turned-out-way-you-expected-5555/

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Generally, focusing on the off-topic areas on a niche-specific forum isn't a good idea. But this usually applies to new and young forums. I haven't checked out your forum, but if it is extremely active, very well-established, and fairly self-sufficient in terms of fresh discussions, activity and posting, then it may be okay to expand the off-topic discussions.
If you do this, make sure you monitor activity, and if at any time the majority of activity/discussion shifts to taking place in the off-topic section, you may want to re-evaluate the situation.

Unless you don't care if your forum remains content-specific. If that's the case, then go for it and don't look back!

 

Yes, thank you very much for this observation.
I was thinking about the same thing.

The problem was that we wanted to classify all of the diseases into several categories, but we ended up with too many categories. We created a special forum for each category.

And now, I have the longest forum in the world! :yes::rofl:

 

Exactly. This is what worries me.

But. Out of 20000 posts 5000 are written in Water Cooler. When I noticed that, I could not believe my eyes.

I am not sure at all!

 

I don't think that's too bad, because on one of my forums the off-topic posts make up 25% of the entire forum's post count, and I don't think the discussion is too diluted.

Just keep an eye on the ratio/percentage, and if it goes higher than 25%, you should reassess things.