The subject of this post contains a little bit of irony to it; I hope that this post is taken seriously by everyone.
I am a member of dozens of online forum communities, and an administrator of a handful as well. My involvement in forums and messaging goes way back to the dial up BBS days before the internet was anything outside of something that schools and government facilities had to showcase...
The DotNetNuke forums suck! It's no one persons fault, it's everyone's fault! THAT MEANS YOU!
Why, do you ask? I see three major problems with it, all equally at fault:
- Newbie users
- Regular users
- Moderators and Administrators
Let me elaborate:
New users are constantly asking the same questions over and over again. It is important for new users to take a moment to make an effort to search for the answer to their question before posting it. This takes some encouragement! A sticky thread at the top of each forum with an FAQ that is kept up to date and a note describing how to search for the answer to a question before starting a duplicate thread. Additionally, most users do read a few threads before they make their first post... If everyone makes it a point to encourage this practice new users will follow the example they see practiced in the few threads they do read. Moderators should be looking out for duplicate threads, posting a link to the active thread on the topic, and locking the duplicate. This entire issue fuels on itself, the more "junk" is found in the last 20 threads posted (threads that do not go anywhere)... the more likely it is that another post will be made without the effort of seriously searching for an existing thread first.
This leads right into the regular user problems we have here. This is not a technical support column! You will not be receiving a bill in the mail! IT IS FREE!... But nothing is ever really free. In order for forums like this to work, just as many people need to be posting ANSWERS as there are posting QUESTIONS! This is not something we should expect out of new users, but people who come back here time and time again to look for answers to their questions. If you've made 5 questions over the course of the last year; why not take the time to answer 5 right now? Even answering your own questions is a significant help to others who will run into the same issue you had... Go back to those unanswered posts you made 6 months ago and answer yourself! This means less meaningless unanswered posts in the last 20 new threads... and snowballs into a considerably more useful thread.
95% of the users on this forum are guilty of this! I'll admit, I am one of them! This is me trying to change myself. DotNetNuke is an awesome product and it's being offered to all of us COMLETELY FREE OF CHARGE... This is your opportunity to give back to the community. Your 60 minutes spent answering someones questions once every two weeks *really can* lead to more feature updates making it into future versions of DotNetNuke, bugs being fixed faster, more modules available at reasonable prices, more skins available at reasonal prices... You may not be getting a paycheck at the end of the month but you are getting hundreds of dollars in extra value each and every time you post! Making support and conversation forums more valuable means more people in the community to be sharing resources with each other.
My last comment is about the moderators and administrators. I only have a single issue here... Why the approval based moderation? In a community this big it is simply unnessisary! Knowing that it may take HOURS for your post to get approved and then even more HOURS to receive a response is a deturrent from posting at all! This is actually the major issue of why I decide to start this thread. I consider it the biggest bottleneck in the usefulness of these forums.
I am not suggesting that you need unmoderated forums... I'm suggesting that moderation can happen AFTER threads have gone public. Make certain rules clear; and if someone breaks those go in afterwards and edit the post to make it compliant (indicate that you had done so) or delete or lock the post altogether.
If you're afraid that posts will not get moderated fast enough; start handing out moderator privleges to your userbase! Look for everyone in the top 50% of posters and pick out 5 people to give moderator privleges to and ask them to help "Keep things clean." If 5 doesn't end up being enough pick out another 5! Start a moderator forum that gives samples of what kind of things to moderate and what not to, and procedures to take... There is no reason moderators have to be restricted to staff or administration; you have a huge community out here; make use of it!
If you had 30 assigned moderators that each randomly checked the boards once a week, and 5 moderators who checked the boards once a day... You'd have more then enough resources to make sure that policies were followed.
I love DotNotNuke. It's awesome, the core team is awesome, the community is awesome... but these forums could use a little love! I come back here every few weeks and each time am dissapointed in how unorganized they seem to be; too many people reading and not enough people posting!
I can't tell you how frustrating it is to search for an answer to a question and find 10 separate threads all asking the same question and none of them being answered.
Those are my two cents. I hope that it might make a difference.
Matt Christenson
www.RealSkydiving.com