The Impact of Unexpected SE Rankings on the Tone of Your Forum

a single ranking can change the whole vibe of your forum

[lorenzinho2]

About six months ago, our large online community began ranking, somewhat out of the blue, for the term "tv evangelists."

Historically, this San Francisco based forum has been very liberal, and the tone and general world view has been very much what you would expect of primarily an urban user base.

It is not so anymore.

Not complaining, not making any judgments, just remarking on an interesting phenomenon. In fact the clash between the legacy users and the waves of evangelist seekers has been an eye opening experience for everyone involved.

Anyone have similar stories?

[rogerd]

That's an interesting story... I think it's fairly common for forums to rank for odd terms, even if they don't always represent culture conflict. One forum I admin has ranked, at odd times, for a TV show, a geographic location, and a sports figure. I'm sure there were plenty of others that I didn't notice. None of these produced much in the way of major new membership or topic directions even though they sent some traffic and generated a few posts in that topic.

[wheel]

We 'suffered' an influx in our technical forum a few years ago. A similiar site effectively shut down and we got the traffic. It was rough in terms of clashes for a few months but eventually settled down. There's still a core group from the influx but they've fully integrated. That core group is really just one of the many groups on the site now. (our site is for a certain technical group. The influx would be kind of like an engineering forum used mostly by electrical engineers, who had a big rush of chemical engineers).

I say, just hang in there.