Does it help to offer prizes, whether monetary or virtual to get more new posts on your forum? If so, what type of forum prizes would you offer? Try to think of some unusual prize ideas.
Writing a newsletter for your community is a good way to keep everyone up to date on the latest forum news. However, sometimes, there are private matters that need to be discussed with forum staff as a group. Do you th...
Is it useful to have many forum members on board with staff badges and maybe that could cause forum members to be on better behavior or at least discourage trolling and spam. Do you think this is true?
Is there a specific post count you want to see from moderators daily? And, how do you enforce a post count?
At what point would you close or lock a forum thread? For instance, what requirements must be met before a thread is locked?
What would you do if your most prolific forum poster left your forum?
Did you ever encounter a situation where a well known forum member started asking for money from others, either on forum or in private messages? How did you handle the situation?
How many years of experience do you require from a mod before you will hire them for your forum? Or, would you simply hire someone with no experience?
Do you only expect spam moderation on posts from moderators or do you have other duties they are supposed to do?
Has this ever happened where your admin just disappeared one day? This happened about a year ago on my forum, but only because my admin had suffered a bad fall and eye injury. Later on, she returned to the forum to exp...
What reasons would you have for firing an admin or mod on your forum? And, what steps would you take before firing them, such as talking with the person and giving warnings?
For instance, did you ever take a vacation or go on sick leave and have to leave your forum unattended or at the mercy of your staff?
Do you have so many inactive staff members that it damages your forum? How do you deal with the problem of inactive staff?
Ten years ago, online sites such as Yahoo groups were very popular as they combined the best of email groups with forums (allowing members to respond to group messages via email or go online to the forum). Then came for...
It's easy to put up a forum and get people to post. But how do you get the forum to feel like a community so that everyone pulls together and helps each other or feels emotionall invested in the welfare of the site?
Did you ever make a change on your forum that brought animosity or conflict among your community members?
Do you have a plug in or mod in place so that visitors can email each other safely via the forum, such as with 'email me' or mail to links? What mods do you use for this?
How do you deal with it when your forum becomes too stressful to manage? What are your stress management techniques?
On some forums you can get a custom designed avatar or signature banner made by one of the forum members. Do you offer this service on your own forum?
Do you allow affiliate ads on your forum, whether on banner ads (sold to advertisers) or on signature lines?
I love forums where I can login automatically. These forums are really easy to post on. And, I think other forum members might want the same. I want to find a way to make my forum automatically login members when they...
On some forums you can give the option to allow members to choose their own favorite theme. This theme is individual to each member, though there is usually a default theme. Do you offer this option to your forum membe...
Are there any really big changes you want to make to your forum in the next months or year? Will these changes include a major software update/upgrade or expensive themes? Or, will they be minor tweaks?
Assuming you had to describe your forum to a friend, what would you say?
How likely are your forum members to recommend your forum to a friend or family member? And, do many of your forum members come from direct referral?
Staff boredom can occur when your staff members are doing the same jobs all the time. For that reason, it helps to alternate jobs or change the board duties around, so each person has a chance to try out a new set of ta...
When I first started my forum, I was constantly involved in it, making dozens of daily posts, promoting and advertising. It became a full time job, taking away from every other part of my life. Time being what it is, t...
Let's talk about some of the ways you come up with interesting posts that excite and involve your forum members. One of the things that works for me is to do a lot of reading in my niche and then post 'question' type f...
What is your forum's page rank and what things can you suggest to help other forum owners increase their own site page rank?
Do you have a subforum where all forum introductions go (such as each new member gets their own thread) or do you only have an 'introductions' thread, where every new member posts? Which works best for your forum?
On some forums that I visit, everyone is on a first name basis and the atmosphere is very friendly and relaxed. On others, there is more of a stand off type attitude and it seems there is no real connection between the ...
As admins and moderators, it's always possible to have a favorite member(s) on forum. And, that bias could lead to favoritism such as allowing those members to get away with more than needed. How can we as forum owners...
Sometimes, on my forum, a discussion goes off track when someone asks a question out of context. So I just split off the post to become a new discussion.
When merging forum threads, do you make a note where posts from the merged thread start that the post was merged with another? Such as edit that first merged post to say, 'thread merged from (link). I have seen this do...
On my little forum, we get a few new members a week. And, I'm always so happy when we get new members and posts. My forum is my labor of love and I really want great things for it, but just happy on days when we get ma...
Sometimes when doing my forum posting gigs, a forum that I'm posting on will be down with database errors, so I can't get onto the site and complete the gig. This is not related to anything I can change as I don't own t...
I have set my site as one of my start tabs on Firefox so it loads when I first go online. That way I will always be sure to see my forum as one of the first things in the morning. I am already logged in, so I can see a...
My forum is hosted for free on a free forum site which does not allow me to ad Adsense or banners. (The banners are on the forum, but not mine, they belong to the host company). Is there any other way to monetize a fre...
How do you deal with duplicate posts? Do you merge or delete the posts? Or, do you leave up the posts?
Is it possible to create a high quality forum on a free host that will last for many years? Or, is this only available for someone willing to pay for hosting/domain?
