Would your Recommend having a Forum on your Blog Site?

Hey DP Community!

Just wanted to get a little bit of feedback for a Blog Site.

Do you think building a Forum for your Blog can be beneficial or it could just be a waste of time fighting against Spams and Bots?

I had Forum Sites before but I got bombarded with Spammers and Fake Bots every single day. It really got tiring and well I was also a newbie online at the time so the site didn't succeed anyways.

But I know there are a lot of Spam problems when building a Forum.

What is your opinion on having a Forum Section on your website?

Any success stories with Forum Sites> ..? ..

Your feedback is appreciated guys!


Much success! ..
Thanks!

Cheers!

 

If you have a group of people that you think will be active on that forum. I see no problem there. I think that starts for forums are hardest especialy when you need some initial content to start discussion and engage users.

Thanks,,
Johnny

 

I think that already having a website geared around blogging, will be rather hard to gain traffic and active users to a forum when conversations and comments can be left on the blog posts.

 

It's a sure way to increase the Alexa rank of your blog.

As for the spammers and fake bots, usually there are useful add-ons/plugins which you can install on your forum and they could help you alot in fighting against them.

 

THanks for your feedback guys!!

I agree with you here - I think that building a Forum within my Blog will be a challenge to get active users in there if I dont have a huge amount of traffic coming in - people are most likely to interact in the Comments below the Blog Posts.

You are spot on - on this @enac0 !!

But I was thinking more of creating a Forum Website on its own Domain so the entire Website would be the Forum. And see how it goes from there.

I'll see if I jump into this challenge once I get more feedback on the subject here

Thank you for your time@!

Much success!

 

If you can do some good research and manage to gain some high rankings in low competitive keywords and highly relevant I think that it will be quite easy to start your forum. In my opinion you will have to install some content lockers where you can hide information your users will want and force them to sign-up. You may also be able to gain some users by answering questions on yahoo and similar websites and using your new forum link to suggest they look there for any additional information.

 

Yes i would like because of following reasons:
1.To get involvement of more people on my site.
2.To get more traffic.
3.It helps to get high alexa rank.
4.Google Page-rank also increase.

 

I guess it really depends on the blog. If you can build a community around your blog, then it's a good idea. Spam is going to happen, but as it's been stated, there are plugins for that.

 

I do consider making a new forum tricky (altho I spend hours every day browsing in such ).

First of all - the Spam. You are all correct that it CAN be stopped, I can argue about how easy it is do so. There are tons of plugins and even the most popular ones might now work for you and your forum configuration. I remember starting a test forum before and was amazed by the amount of bots registering every day (from day 1!). So I made a little test - applied some known plugins, made the registration triple-secured (with captcha, security questions and such), and even though the amount of bots per day dropped like 10 times, there were still a number coming in. It's like they were laughing and mocking my feeble attempts to stop them .
Now imagine if it was a live forum and you are a real user wanting to sign up. Wouldn't you be irritated if you have to pass a dozen security checks just to register? I know I will... But lets leave that aside, its obvious that its possible to protect your forum, many others have proven it, so i don't consider this the main concern.

The second issue raised is more demanding of your attention - how to fill the forum with users if you're just starting. Now, at first, I thought OP talked about integrating the forum in the blog website, as a subdomain for example, and driving his already-built audience to participate in the forum section. This is a good thing for popular bloggers, and even though this can be pointless, because of the comments below posts, the least you can do is ask your followers if this is a feature they would be interested in. After all, they will be initial users, so their opinion matters the most. Speaking of a forum as a separate website, shows a different side of the issue - raising users from scratch and filling a lot of content that will be engaging for the future users. This might prove a very hard task and without the proper tools and means of popularization, all your efforts might go in vain. A good suggestion in this case would be to start the forum with a group of your closest friends, that are also interested in participating. Slowly building content with them, raising new topics and discussions, will get you to a point, where you have enough to be read and only then you can start thinking about places to advertize and drive new people to the forum.

Anyways, just some viewpoints to consider

 

Wow, there are a lot of killer replies to your post, huh? Such awesome information here, and very smart people. Excellent to be alive in this day and age.

 

well,

sometimes i visit and write something in my blog. A blog can be a tool of communication. well, a forum and blog can bridges the relationship between different individuals .

 

spam will never stop. it is a daily chore.

mod alone will not be able to handle all the spams that coming daily. the best method will always be manually approve the new members. however you can see some trend in term of the country of origin and also the username. and take advantage of that.

i love forum as all the materials are generated by the members. we just need to maintain the forum from the back end.