"Board too big for me!"

[MattR]

I've heard from a few users who find being a member on our forums to be difficult due to the sheer volume of posts that we have on a daily basis on some of the forums (Expos for example has 130,000 posts and hundreds a day)...

What can be done to help these users out? Most of our forums don't suffer from as high traffic counts but I participate in some which, if you don't visit at least every few hours you have a hundred new posts to deal with and you miss quite a bit since, of course, you can't read them all.

The only thing I can think of at this moment (it's 4AM so I'm a bit groggy) is something like a "digest" of messages posted to the forum...

A digest, to put it breifly, is often used on mailing lists to collect new messages and deliver them all at once.. So instead of receiving 30 messages throughout the day you'll get one at the end of the day with the contents of 30 messages in there..

However when we're talking hundreds of posts a day is that a viable solution? Is there something else we as forum owners / developers can do to help these users out?

I think most owners' goals include incresing forum traffic -- but there reaches a point in which there is just SO much traffic that in effect it's maxed out -- how many more Expos fans are out there that have the time to visit every hour or two so they can catch threads from "falling off" the first page?

argh! no spellcheck at 4AM really, really sucks.

[Kier]

Re: "Board too big for me!"

Originally posted by mrogish
argh! no spellcheck at 4AM really, really sucks.

I could build in an ActiveX control that calls the MS Office spellchecker... but I'm sure there would be complaints from Nutscrape lovers and Linux freaks

[George L]

same here Matt

too many posts for my members to read through... some find it hard to keep up and spend hours each day trying and some get worn out that they decide temporarily quit my forums to concentrate on stuff like study or work hehe

for me i closed off new member rego for the past couple of weeks so that i can control the rate of growth and to try and re-establish the tighter knit community i had when we had only hundreds and not thousands of members

[Me2Be]

We have the same problem!! With over 5000 posts a day and about 150-200 new members a day, many of our members are feeling totally lost and just feel like it takes too much work to try and 'fit in' with our community. And lately for the past couple of months, it seems that only 1 out of every 10 new members ever post

We've tried everything, the "buddy system" where our addict members act as a big sister to our new members, creating a new members forum, have our addicts search out new members who post to make sure their posts have tons of responses...

And it doesn't seem to be working very well, but we're still trying!

[Nicholas Brown]

Re: Re: "Board too big for me!"

Originally posted by Kier
Linux freaks

C'mon lads, lets send in the dogs - Kier is insulting us

[Kathy]

Thinking outloud...

Is there a time when it is a good opportunity to divide the forums and message boards into separate entities?

I know that when some of our forums got too busy we brainstormed and came up with two distinct categories that were really being posted in the one forum. We made two forums and it slowed down the posting in one.

We've done that several times. Divided to slow it down and make it manageable for the members. Not sure if it will work for you, but I'm sure there must be some answer....Of course, we aren't posting 5000 posts per day either.