On the care and feeding of online forums
I’ve had two online forum transition experiences in a week now. It’s interesting to observe how quickly an existing user base can be fragmented or even lost altogether.
The Yahoo Finance message boards uproar continues. Now that I’ve tried it more than once during the past few days, I’m still finding it difficult to scan quickly. More importantly to Yahoo, there are signs of mass migration to other message boards by very active participants looking for a new home. Much of the flock may still settle back at Yahoo, but it looks like there’s been a lot of people checking out the alternatives during the past few days.
On a completely different front, I have been part of a running forum which has been at Runners World magazine. I usually check in once a week or so, and participate in a weekly motivational game in which teams of runners post their weekly mileage. A few weeks ago, Runners World changed their forum software. In the process, the site went completely offline for a while, and later required re-registration by existing members. Their new message board there isn’t as much of a change as the Yahoo boards, but the extended outage appears to have dispersed many of the participants to other message boards. I only check once a week, and haven’t succeeded in re-registering my account yet, so I effectively disappeared. A few people from the Marathons forum eventually tracked me down today and pointed me at an “escapee” forum set up during the interim, which seems to have picked up many regulars in just a few weeks.
Assuming that either Yahoo Finance or Runners World finds it constructive to run an online message board, it’s interesting that there has been very little (no?) dialogue that I know of between the operators of the sites and their respective user communities. I suspect that a few bread crumbs of communication would have kept more people on board.
Tags: socialsoftware, community, management
