I've been toying around with several ideas and have come to wonder, how much content would be good to have for grand opening of a forum? Looking at it from a user's perspective, let's say you visit a brand new forum (and you know it is new) in an active niche, which has very big forums. How many interesting threads would you have to see if you were to consider the forum seriously? 10? 50? 100? 500? Do you never take brand new forums seriously anyway?
While content is obviously an important part of a forum, when a site is brand new you're not going to have a lot - unless you get lucky and have a team around you to develop the site along with you before you open. If I'm randomly surfing for a specific forum niche and I land on what's obviously a newly set up site, it won't matter whether there's 5, 25 or 100 threads to me, so long as I like the feel of the budding forum which can be discovered by reading the threads available. If I post and days go by before a response is made, then I'll write it off.. if someone replies within the day of posting, then I'll likely stick around for a little while and see what happens.
Well I'd appreciate more than 20 topics in all of the forums. I don't care how many the board has combined. But 20+ topics on each area would be a god start
I'll start actively posting in pretty much any new forum as long as I'm interested in the subject and I can see that the staff are making an effort to post
Its not so much as how many topics you have, for me it is if I like the forum and there are active users on it 5+. If I visit a forum and I am the only one on at that time I will simply forget about it, because it means its inactive. =/
First thing I always do is check -number of posts -number of members - then press view new posts that last one tells me everything gogo
For me it is the quality of the posts within the topics. I've seen fairly new forums with pretty good stats, but after looking properly the 'busy' threads are post count games and suchlike which make me leave straight away. Or, something that really bugs me are the threads with "whoever gets to 50 posts can be a moderator", I mean, what sort of place is that going to be?
You shouldn't do that On my forum, there are times when I am the only one there, but then when someone else starts posting they all start posting and suddenly there are people online all the time. And if new users always come over when it happens to be the quiet time, it never picks off. Those who are sometimes active, need those new users. For me it doesn't matter when someone is online, and I don't mind if I'm the only one online when I'm posting. As long as someone will reply at some point of the day
The estimate seems to be much lower than I had expected. I thought majority would answer something around 500+. I am most pleasantly surprized
To tell you the truth - the forum can have like 10 threads to 50 threads for me to consider it seriously. I look at how passionate the owner is - and see if its a serious project or not. I always like to check out new forums though - because its nice to watch the development of them. Any forum can be taken seriously though.
