Well, the FS forum has been up and running for a couple of days now, and what have I learnt? Well, for starters, spammers are a PITA which are able to get round almost any system you put in front of them. Secondly, the behaviours of users are very interesting.
Consider this: You have a site, be it a forum, or a social-based site such as mySpace. You have no users, but your concept is reliant on users. Users will not come to an empty site and will probably never return once they have witnessed it’s emptiness. So how do these things start? How does someone attract people to an empty social site? It’s quite an interesting conundrum which I am working out at the moment.
So far traffic to the new forum has been intentionally low, as I don’t want a mass of people seeing an empty forum, and due to this there has been a slow but steady influx of new users – some of which are posting happily. So the next step I suppose is to slowly increase the traffic to the site by increasing the number of external links, and waiting for Google to sort it’s act out. As these happen I would expect the site to hit a critical mass – a point where I believe the community will start to look after itself and the membership will reach a steadily increasing level up to an upper level where it will naturally sit whilst experiencing minor fluctuations as time progresses (a site like mySpaces being obviously a lot larger than that of this site).
So, all in all, I know a lot of people would think me insane for trying to start a forum in the middle of a community awash with sites such as Adobe.com’s forums, and lists such as CF-Talk, but I like the insane, and as I said, its also quite an interesting experiment.
