Discussions
Blogs and Forums - should blogs also have forums attached?
Posted by jphillips • 4/26/07 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: blog, forum
well my question is in the title 
how effective would it be to add a forum to a blog? I've seen a couple blogs do this and i'm wondering if it's a good idea. It can surely make people wanna get involved more. What are your thoughts?
User Comments
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My friend, Colleen started a blog in November and it did okay, for a new blog. She added a forum and now, just 6 month later, her blog is a PR4 and her Alexa is under 25,000.
Of course, Colleen is a marketing genius. She knew what topics were needed and then promoted it everywhere. If done right, a forum can give a blog a huge boost. -
hmph. Can't do links? Well, so you'll know I'm not making it up, the site is GeekySpeaky.com
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Hi Scorpy, we're supposed to be able to do links (aautomatically adds the "nofollow" i think), there's another post about that i think.
I know of geekyspeaky, pretty cool site, makes me think i should maybe add a forum, there's www.younggogetter.com that also has one, and it's really well integrated in their blog template. I'll have to llook into this -
I want to ad forum on my site but I think it'll just encourage spam. -
yeah, that's what i'm wondering, well it surely is possible to require "registration" to the forum and approve the users, then when someone starts posting crap we can always delete their account. Gotta think about it, weigh the pros and cons i guess
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We have just one site with a forum on it--it's not even a particularly high traffic section, and spam deletion requires constant vigilance. Seems a new account can be created just as quickly as we delete the last one...
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Adding a forum to your blog is an excellent idea. It sort of increases your "stickieness" of your blog, that is people will probably rather come back if you got a good discussion going on the forum. Also some topics almost demand a better discussion venue than a conventional blog can offer, for example I so want to add a blog to my site. -
test www.yackyack.co.uk-
were not allowing hyperlinking at the moment due to spam concerns -
is nofollow on?
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if we bring the links back they will most likely be nofollow to prevent abuse and spam.
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I dont think half of the people know what a nofollow is anyway. -
when a link has "rel=nofollow" attribute, it prevents search engines to "follow" to those links. In the blogosphere, wordpress has nofollow by default, so leaving a comment on a blog won't get you a link back (if you enter your blog url in the comment box or something), so removing nofollow attribute is:
1 - a great way to reward bloggers that do leave comments by giving them a linkback
2- can lead to more spam and unrelevant comments, cause people just want a linkback
NINE: now they know what nofollow is
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I think forums are great. I have an idea I'd like to add to my blog but I have a feeling that a discussion could follow. I really don't want to go through the trouble of setting up a seperate site w/ a message board. How would you go about integrating one onto your blog?? I'm a bloggin newbie and I'm just dipping my toes into the pool of tech stuff. -
I think the spam concerns whilst sort of understandable, are a bit of an overreaction. This is a community of trusted users who have had blogs accepted already, why would they lose that trust by spamming the hell out of it? Maybe you guys also need some form of blog verification process too. Otherwise you'll get spammers submitting new blogs, under false identitites and abusing the hell out of everything.
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Forums are great and I'm glad to see one here, but I don't know about adding one to any of my blogs. How would that affect the comments portion in general? Would it mean that people would chat on the forum instead of commenting?
I do manage forums related to my industry and interests but have kept them quite separate, although I do promote some of my blogs via the forums. Although I know of a TV show which has just set up both a forum and a blog on their website and that seems to be working. A lot of work maintain both though. -
techcrunch.com started off as a blog and grew steadily. They now have forums too, which appear to be fairly active. If you have a big subscriber base and repeat visitors then a forum could be a good addition to the mix.
I don't think it really works too well to just add a forum and expect it to flourish, not without some major help and major promotion. A dead forum strewn with tumbleweed threads is no asset at all and IMO could even detract from what you are trying to achieve. -
Is there a forum here? -
A forum is a great idea but I think you should have a large and active readership in place before starting it. -
Jonathan, you open with a great question and Rob and others have brought a great deal of wisdom to it. My thought is that if I have a forum on my blog it needs to be about a topic that concerns a post I publish. Are there ways to connect the two? -
Look for the plugin 'simple forum' works well and fits into any forum, plenty of options as well -
I would imagine a reasonable percentage of folks with blogs might not be able to handle the tech maintenance issues of a forum. (And I include myself that category. :-)) I think it would just be an added element you'd have to factor in for time-- administering, etc. -
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From what I've seen of blogs with forums, the forums work best when they're used as an extension to the commenting section. Comments on the blog part can get long and hard to follow, especially when one reader goes off on a tangent. Forums can prevent this from happening as much. -
I think it depends on the blog content as to whether or not it's a truly effective tool. If you add a forum and it sits unused it isn't a very attractive element on a blog...at least that's my opinion.
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