Forum Moderators: phranque
The discussion board is on a higher education Web, and we do make our users register first. Thanks in advance.
The common benefits include networking. Business people make contact with vendors that provide information that may in the long run lead to more sales.
Another benefit would be peer to peer information exchanges. Here one person benefits from the prior experiences of his peers.
The killers on discussion boards are the code debugging questions that could have been answered by a basic manual. Sophisticated questions about code techniques often get peoples juices flowing.
You need to seed discussion boards with good questions from time to time too.
Registered boards may keep away a few hackers but many, many casual visitors are turned off by the process.
A far larger problem I think is the entrenched, foot draggers and closed-minded registered users rather than the spammers. Spam can be deleted but the gloom and doom naysayers drag down many boards.
A board is built on just one new quality posting member per XYZ. In the beginning, that XYZ will be months, then weeks, and finally a couple a week. At that point, you may want to do what we've been doing here for 6-12months and hold down growth in favor of quality. A board is only as good as it's last post.
Other than that, it takes day-in-day-out dedication and committment to make it work (not to mention, many, many friends).
fostering the quality and value of the postings is a continual process.
I like your "drive by commenting" statement and that's exactly what we wanted to avoid (along with any liability issues)
Thanks everyone!
