Growing pains
 

Hi,

I have 5 categories containing 35 1st level forums with several sub forums. All in all 173 forums. Since I switched to vB and vBSEO, the forum is exploding, growth tripled within the last 12 months. I`m looking at this with a laughing and a weeping eye.

My users complain that they just can`t keep track of the new posts and are overflooded with information. The cozy rather intimate atmosphere of the first years is gone. Well I guess the latter can`t be changed but I would like to know how you deal with the first. I more and more tend to look at the forum as a huge pile of information that can be accessed with ONE rather unflexible view.

Yesterday I found a very interesting video from a google tech talk where Brion Vibber, lead developer of wikipedia talks about the growth of wikipedia and the problems of keeping track of all the changes. Especially the part from 10:00 till 17:00 is interesting as the things he says are similar to big forums.

So they want to include tools that allow users to create user-specific filters showing (even actively informing) them what they want to see instead of forcing them to do the filtering manually. I think this is exactly what I need for my forum.

At the moment I`m thinking about moving some sections of the forums to

• a FAQ section
• a glossary
• a wiki
• a weekly community created podcast summarizing the changes of the last week
• a magazine with articles extracting the best of popular threads on the same/similar topics

this will probably make things more transparent but I have to put a lot of work into it as it has to be as easy as possible for the users to use it. No double logins, no different interfaces etc.

And it still won`t stop my forum from growing. So what can be done here? Subscribe to posts from certain members? Subscribe to tags? A much more user friendly search where users cann add and combine search rules like in the Thunderbird mail search?

I`d love to get some feedback. I`m sure I`m not the only one facing this problems.

All the best,
Sacha

PS: I hope this is the right place for this topic. I couldn`t find a proper forum for it on vb.com

The only solution I see it is to hire moderators who will start a blog where they can post daily resumates with important posts events etc. In this way users can receive those resumates instead of a bunch of thread links.

You should be really happy that the forums are growing like that. You can finally start making money and pay for server upgrades/blogger writeups etc. Congratulations in your success, don't even wisper a word that you regret the "forums are dead" like before... many others would like to be in your shoes. Think at Digg for a moment.

Did vBSEO help you forum hit this type of success or?

Hi Teck,thanks! Yes, you`re right I shouldn`t complain at all but I can`t just let it go on like that either. I think resumates is a good idea. Hm, thinking about it I could start some kind of podcast. Something like a community-radio-channel. Thanks for your input, my brain starts working ;-).

all the best,
Sacha

--------------- Added [DATE]1197838929[/DATE] at [TIME]1197838929[/TIME] ---------------

Hi,it`s difficult to say to what extent vbSEO is responsible for the growth as several things changed at the same time:

• switching from phpBB to vB
• splitting my forums up into new categories and sub-forums (wasn`t possible like that with phpBB at that time)
• installing vBSEO
• a bit Search Engine Marketing

but I`m really sure vBSEO did help quite a bit, yes.

all the best,
Sacha