What is your #1 problem running a forum?

Aayush

Well-known member
We all face problems running forums and maintaining them.

Getting active users or what people call the sticky users! This is the number #1 problem I face running a forum.

What is your #1 problem running a forum that you wish never existed?
 
Getting members, but most importantly retaining them. If you retain members, traffic will grow because of the increased content and activity.
 
Turning guests into members. We do a 90 min live streamed video talk show on our forum 4 nights a week. Most nights we have a professional hockey player from the AHL or ECHL as our guest and we average about 300 guest connections per night about 70% watching the entire show, but only 2-3 of them a night register that night.
 
Managing low quality posts is our biggest challenge. The fact that we are always lack of committed moderators. Our next try is to enable the members, allowing members with certain criteria to run their own forum by requesting it with us. With a poll we will decide if the forum is accepted and he is able to appoint his own sticky users to kickstart activities within it.
 
Managing low quality posts is our biggest challenge. The fact that we are always lack of committed moderators. Our next try is to enable the members, allowing members with certain criteria to run their own forum by requesting it with us. With a poll we will decide if the forum is accepted and he is able to appoint his own sticky users to kickstart activities within it.
That’s a really interesting problem to solve with machine learning.
The challenge here is that the post before yours is actually a quality content and relevant to the thread, however it’s just 3 words and most algorithms might mark it as Spam.
What’s your forum URL?
I’d like to browse around see what kind of posts you are referring to generally on your forum.
 
That’s a really interesting problem to solve with machine learning.
The challenge here is that the post before yours is actually a quality content and relevant to the thread, however it’s just 3 words and most algorithms might mark it as Spam.
What’s your forum URL?
I’d like to browse around see what kind of posts you are referring to generally on your forum.

https://www.undertable.asia

The nature of my site is unlike most and we have different set of issues. We already set in a few measures but they are smart people, always knows how to make a turnaround.
 
Turning guests into members. We do a 90 min live streamed video talk show on our forum 4 nights a week. Most nights we have a professional hockey player from the AHL or ECHL as our guest and we average about 300 guest connections per night about 70% watching the entire show, but only 2-3 of them a night register that night.
Why don’t you do it as a free signup to watch the video talk show kind of thing.
You’ve already done a lot of video shows in the past, you can put links on the signup page of previous video talk shows and let people know who all have been on your show in the past and how interesting they are. If 300 people are watching the live show, I bet they’ll sign up.

What I’ve learned is that people don’t do what you want them to do unless you tell it to them explicitly.

You can try this idea for a week. If you end up implementing that and you have success with that, do let me know.

Cheers!
 
https://www.undertable.asia

The nature of my site is unlike most and we have different set of issues. We already set in a few measures but they are smart people, always knows how to make a turnaround.
Quite a niche there. You’ve got 500k posts which seems good to me. I can imagine trouble finding good moderators for the niche.

Are most of your low quality posts spam? BTW didn’t browse, NSFW. :P
 
Yea it is NSFW. Two of us actually prune away hundreds of post. Trust me it is getting horribly tired. almost 1/3 of the posts are low quality. Let's see how it goes in the near future.
 
Yea it is NSFW. Two of us actually prune away hundreds of post. Trust me it is getting horribly tired. almost 1/3 of the posts are low quality. Let's see how it goes in the near future.
How do you define a low quality post? would you mind sharing a screenshot or post when you find one?
 
Probably a "PM me", "I have big "C..k" etc.. It is probably a bad idea to post my screenshots here due to the NSFW content.
 
Probably a "PM me", "I have big "C..k" etc.. It is probably a bad idea to post my screenshots here due to the NSFW content.
Sure will do later today.

On a funny note, reminds me of an episode from Silicon Valley show, using machine learning to filter out d**k pics on a social networking site. 😂
 
Getting advertising. We can get advertising from within our industry but have no access outside of it. We have very affluent demographics and out numbers, while not huge are very good. If anyone has a ad person/agency that they recommend, please send them over.
 
Post friction and PostGuard are tools that limit low quality posts.
Another approach that works well is to use the sin-bin approach. A usergroup for low quality users that has very restrictive permissions. @Xon 's User Essentials has some nice permissions for this.
Stophumanspam limits link posting and therefore resticts those users..

The most important tool I use is a custom reputation system to demote accounts that get too many bad ratings and promote users that get good ratings. However, the xenforo permission system doesn't lend itself well for this and therefore I am currently doing the demotions manually until new custom functionality arrives.
 
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