Do Conversations (Private Messages) help your community?

Marcus

Well-known member
How do conversations help your community? I noticed that I nearly have as much conversation messages as public post messages on my forum. Lots of stuff gets discussed in private where only the participants have access to the messages.
 
Community members always have the need to discuss things in private. I agree about the resources overhead especially the database size due to messages but I look at it this way: By using your forum's messaging facility they are still visiting your forum, contributing to your traffic and seeing your adverts.
 
It helps build up the community, members get to know each other better and spend more time online.

My members mainly use profile posting but also PC for quite a lot of things, sometimes some members just want to chat with someone from their same country in a different language and prefer PC and things such as that.
 
I am wondering about this too

I run a tech / gadget forum and posts contribute to publicly accessible helpful / useful data that can be searched at the forum or Google

If members retreat to non public facing / invite only conversations I may be able to show them ads and affiliate links but

I will get no Google SEO benefit
Newbie members won't be able to learn from the conversations
The community will be unable see the content - so no ad displays
Conversations may fly under moderator radar

That a lot of 'control' lost IMHO

It makes me feel unsettled as admin.

But I am open minded to possible benefits (what are they?)

How about this combination below?

One to up to 5 people conversations can remain private (by option)
And...
Optionally - invite only Multi person (no limit) conversations can become publicly visible "invite only threads"

Any thoughts on that?
 
It helps build up the community, members get to know each other better and spend more time online.

My members mainly use profile posting but also PC for quite a lot of things, sometimes some members just want to chat with someone from their same country in a different language and prefer PC and things such as that.
This.

If people are using your conversations a lot, stick one or two non-intrusive adverts into the conversations template and reap the rewards.
 
On my personal community I think most of the private exchange is by email. A little support work on the siftware comes to me. Not much else.

On my biz community I disable PCs because too much was going into PCs - support work that should be shared.
Ive begged for an addon to limit a usergroup to selected other usergroup for PCs - that would help.
I could then limit PCs to a few selected recipients to handle newcomer support.
Or limit staff to each other.
I also have department teams who I dont want to waste time chtting to each other. There are also confidentiality issues between groups.

But none of the devs has done it so I am forced to keep PCs switched off.
 
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