Is the forum the main component of your site?

[jauburn]

or is it ancillary?

and have you ever considered--or implemented--a swap of the roles?

 

[Amaury]

Yes. No.

 

[Adam K M]

Yes, main component for one of my sites, and no forum for the other. Haha.
Yes, I have thought of having a swap, and was planning on doing so, until I realised that my wordpress site couldn't be integrated into the users with xenforo very nicely. Needless to say, I left that idea in the dust, I'd never want to make a client register twice. (That and it seems weird)

 

[SelfSufficientMe]

I mulled over this question for a long time and then decided to make a completely new website for my forum but still link it to my blog (sister sites).

It's not for everyone and isn't as clean but I'm now glad i did it this way because xf on its own makes a really great website.

If it were integrated into my blog as I was going to I don't think I would be as happy because I'd have less flexibility more constraints.

There's good and bad - I suppose it comes down to personal opinion and site make up but that's my thoughts anyway.

 

[Alpha1]

My site started as a forum, but the community clearly needed more functionality. So I added:

• wiki to prevent knowledge to be lost within the bulk of threads
• an image gallery for photo's to be uploaded
• a video gallery for documentaries and user uploads
• a document archive for scientific studies
• blog for opinion articles
• social groups for specialistic community discussion. technically still forum.
• chat for direct interaction
• news article directory so that users can stay up to date on latest events
• reviews directory for companies, products and services
• helpdesk
  
• surveys
• question and answers
• multisite functionality

Now I am trying to replicate all vbulletin addon functionality that in xenforo. It's a large project but doable.
Forum is still the main component of my site, but other components are taking an ever increasing role. Mainly because we used to have forum to cater for everything from news, opinion articles, images, video, Q&A etc. But nowadays people are used to have much better functionality dedicated to the purpose. It no longer suffices to use forums for such.

I think its essential to give users a more integrated functionality instead of forum with a lot bolted on or forum with addons. I will rather provide a complete experience of which forum is an important factor.