There are literally tons of forums on pretty much every niche we can think of. And most of them vanishes within a year or fail. Only a few can survive including the die hard ones. Why you think most of the forums fail to make it a success?
If users getting what there looking from the forum they'll keep posting otherwise they go................
Mostly b/c nobody is going to use a forum in the very beginning when it has no users or posts. They are incredibly hard to start. Creating a successful one is like striking oil.
because when you come to a forum you want to find a quick answer, if forum has no users, then no such answer can be given and thus people stop visiting the forum and go to a forum where there are more people and more activity, creating a good forum involves tons of marketing, mainly hiring quality posters for expensive price so they can start posting in the forum and creating an artificial environment, this same content not only helps to create activity, but also helps boost the forum in search engine ranking. It is wise to combine link development strategy in conjunction with creating quality content on a forum. I forgot to add, there are some forums out there that hire posters, best thing to do IMO, is to do the posting yourself, you will need to develop a posting strategy, go to other forums find relevant thread ideas and rewrite them from scratch, create thousands of artificial members each responsible to its own role in the artificial game, hard work, but possible
To make a forum succeed you need a core of committed users who keep the conversation up to date! Imagine logging onto a forum and all the posts are weeks old! You wouldn't use it - like markn26 said it's a catch22. Once a forum has users, more people want to join
from what i have observed, forums that succeed start with an exisitng userbase, however small. e.g a group of 10 like minded friends setting a forum up together and posting lots of topics in the forum. Nobody wants to join an empty forum
You have to establish a community. So if you understand a little bit about psychology, then you understand how to attract and maintain groups. A little bit of Machiavelli doesn't hurt either.
If you start a forum, you immediately get hit with a lot of spam, and managing unwanted messages is tiresome and, if you don't do it, people do not come to your site. Forums need (a) many users and (b) you need to monitor them for spam, so they are high touch. Forums fail because people are not willing to put the time commitment into them.
In my opinion forums are like raising a baby. We have nourish it with proper management, food(content) etc. Only then we can probably expect to enjoy the fruit someday in future.
Many forum go-er want a social experience & to state their opinion and get noticed or to learn stuff. Not many forum provide this unique service.
Good point. Getting to the magical critical mass quickly is crucial. Sometime you have to hire a bunch of moderators and have them reply often to every post. Build content fast and that is the first step. Folks want numbers
Forums fail when they don't have enough members to make them worthwhile. Unfortunately most forums are tiny and are probably not worth the effort to participate in.
Lack of a sense of community seems to be the most common reason for a forum failing. Coming up close behind are administrators and staff not really caring about the either member base or the subject of the forum, which causes the memberbase to shift to a forum where the staff seems to care more.
I'm pretty sure that a forum will fail if there's lack of advertising and activity within the forum itself. There's so many forums that have gone down the drain due to the administrator of the website becoming inactive, and when the administrator is inactive, the forum stops posting, or that's what I've seen. Yugo,
Yeah, which is why I like adding a forum to an existing traffic base. For example, look at dp forum. Shawn released seo tools, already developed a huge traffic base, then added the forum.
It's because of the advent of sites like twitter, facebook and others.. People just hate to signup on forums and reply !