Comments on: SDBloggers on Comments vs Forums

By: sethinsd

sethinsd — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:33:31 +0000

I think one of the key things we touched upon was determining what the difference between forums and blogs were, and what needs each served.
The main difference I see is that forums are not read by RSS consumers. So if you want to give someone the ability to subscribe to a ‘feed’ (beyond telling them to follow you on twitter), you want a blog.

Some forums will give the option of receiving emails when new threads are created, but that isn’t the average use case. Forums are a place to go to for help. And honestly I think forums in their current form are crap. What everyone really wants are chatrooms with history saved+searchable – forums are just an interface to accomplish chats where the time between two events isn’t expected to be immediate.
However, this is how all chat is becoming for me anyway.
Right now I currently have 3 AIM messages I haven’t yet read because I’m busy writing here. The people I interact with via chat are no longer offended if they aren’t given my immediate attention.
This is an entirely new phenomenon taking place today – we’re redefining the social expectations of ‘online chat’.

By: Matt Browne

Matt Browne — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:44:48 +0000

When it comes to forums do you think it looks bad when a forum appears to dead?

Dead, yes- but small, no. Our forum started very small: http://forum.integralimpressions.com/ but grew over time. We are still small, but what is important is that you look active. You can have a few posts and fewer users, but still actively commenting on the conversations and people will know it as a place where they can get help.

Eventually, as @DamienH put it, you build a community and the result is that you don’t have to answer as many questions because the forum participants do it for you. I don’t think our company is quite there yet, but someone like http://www.mindtouch.com is.

Forums still serve an important purpose for consolidating customer q/a and service interactions that can’t be duplicated in the blog comments.

By: wizardelite

wizardelite — Thu, 01 May 2008 17:20:02 +0000

I guess it really depends on the context in which the forum is being used. Considering that I feel that customer service is pretty much dead. I tend to pay attention to forums when it relates to a product or service. In this case I would have to say yes. It would highly effect my opinion of a companies website if their support forum appeared to be dead.

In the end I feel that forums are a thing of the past. Social media is the new game in town and I would put much more value within any site that participated in some form of social media when compared to a forum.

When it come to blogs. It doesn’t influence my opinion of a site one way or another if I didn’t see any comments on any posts. I rarely make any comments myself. Everything I read is thru Google Reader. With that said, a particular post has to be really good to make me go to the site and make any comments on the topic in mention.

In regards to the bigger question. No, I don’t think that it is possible to provide too many options for people to interact with each other. Choice is good and in then end you will find a particular set of options that will dominate the industry.

By: richandcreamy

richandcreamy — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:43:14 +0000

When it comes to forums do you think it looks bad when a forum appears to dead? I tend to think less highly on a website that has a forum that is dead even though I don’t think its fair of me to think that way.

It makes me think that people aren’t interested enough to hangout on a websites forum but it may just be that the website’s demographic isn’t the forum user type.

On the other hand if I see something with no comments it doesn’t influence my opinion of a site.

My big question is:
Is it possible to give people too many options to interact with each other? Does anyone else think a website with a dead forum looks less authoritative ? How about no comments?