How to run a successful forum: Making it more than a Forum!
By: Shawn Joseph Gossman (www.TheAdminZone.com Moderator)

Hello everyone and welcome to another article of my "How to run a successful forum" series. In this article I will discuss making your community more than just a plain Jane forum. Making it more than a forum would be by adding more to it such as interactive features, modifications/hacks, competitions and major additions. I hope you enjoy this article and I would love to hear feedback from everyone including more suggestions and ideas to make your community better!

This article is copyright Shawn J. Gossman (2009) and may be posted on other websites as long as you keep my credit and a link back to this post stating the original article.

So I have an active forum... What next?

Now that you have been through all the steps of this article series, you should have a somewhat active forum community now. The next step would be making it more featured and interactive for members, especially those who are currently active members. You want to give them more to do so that they do not get bored with just a forum. Some forums however can just be a forum but I always preach that is rather boring and eventually I would probably move on because of nothing to do. So let us focus on how to make the community more featured and interactive for other members, staff and even you yourself.

Modifications and Hacks

Its always a good idea to add new modifications and hacks to your community. Look for your software mod/hack database and browse through them finding the right ones you need. Focus on ones that give members something else to do but doesn't take away from the posting process all together. You can also find mods and hacks that help improve being a staff members and add extra security to your community. On my weather forum, I have an arcade hack installed making it possible for members to play various flash powered arcade games right on my forum for free. To ensure that this feature isn't abused or used more than the forum, I have also installed a hack that gives members credits for posting new topics, replies, polls, being active and etc. Always look for mods to help keep posting ongoing as well as add a new feature or two to your community.

Stay away from too many mods and hacks! If you have too many, it can cause errors and be overwhelming when having to update all of them. Plus if you have to many features, it can take away from the posting and even cause your forum members to be confused on what the purpose of the community is. Another important thing to do is research your added mods and hacks, if they are never used and you can not enhance them to be used, then you may want to count your losses and disable them because they will pretty much be just wasting space. Inactive modifications can make your community look inactive and no one likes an inactive community. Make sure mods and hacks you add are easy to use and announced to the community as well.

Contests and Competitions

You may also want to initiate some contests, competitions and prizes for your community. This will help bring in activity and get more members in the process. If your a new community, you should consider running referral contests where members invite more member users to join and can win prizes for doing so. You can also run competitions on most active members using a credit system. Make sure to develop a good set of rules so that the competitions are not abused. Announce any competitions so that all your members can know about them and start to participate in them.

Now let us focus on what to give as prizes! You can do all sorts of thing such as talk to your sponsors into giving their product away as a prize or making a discount in return that you give them free advertisement or something like that. You can also use your own money and give cash away or prizes that are related to your forum's topic or niche. A good niche related prize should have your forum name and website address on it as well. This will help give you more advertising while giving a member a cool prize. If you don't have much money, you can also give free advertising or a year free of VIP/Supporting Membership that usually would cost members money. There are all sorts of things you can give as prizes and rewards.

Major Features

Another addition to consider is a major feature! A major feature would be considered a link directory related to your niche or forum blogs and stuff like that. Be careful if you get a shout box or a chat room though as they can be abused and use more than the forum which is something you do not want.

I hope you all enjoyed my article which is the last in this series. I have ideas for other articles which I will post later on down the road. If you have enjoyed this article, please reply with your feedback as it is very important. Thank you and have a great day!