[Soprano]

Hello,

Recently I’ve been contemplating installing buddypress along with bbpress onto my wordpress. I want to make it a community that focuses on the same desire of self-improvement and spirituality.

I was fortunate to have a few traffic spikes and started getting 20,000 unique hits a day for a few months so I thought it would be a good time to try and capture this visiting audience somehow by motivating them to register and return to be active in a forum community to discus the topics of the articles that brought them there.

However, after visiting showcases of forum sites like http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top100 and http://bbpress.org/about/examples/ I notice the majority of them, even ones with millions of members, seem quite inactive. The latest posts being a few weeks or even months old. Even these bbpress.org forums seem to only get about 20 new threads a day. I know facebook has taken away a large chunk of forum users who now prefer groups and pages.

I always wanted to create a forum community, but when I tried I failed due to lack of traffic to my site, and now that I do have traffic, it seems forums aren’t as stimulating for internet users anymore unless the niche of the forum is very specific. So is it worth going through all the trouble of setting everything up?

Thank you

[Robin W]

This seems to be more a general question about the state of the internet.

It depend on what you want from a forum and your site.

If your site is all about generating money from say advertising rather than providing information, entertainment and/or a service, then unless you generate interest and content, the answer is no.

If you want to add value for your users, then a forum does require effort from moderators, and effort to set up, but is worth it.

Only you can really answer that question.

[Lynqoid]

The great thing about bbPress compared to other forum software is that you can get it up and running pretty quick, do some testing to see if it is worth while and if it isn’t just deactivate the plugin.

[Soprano]

That’s what motivated my choice with bbpress, its ease of installation. I’m not really interested in money, I’m just asking the question because I would really like to have an active forum community but apart from a few exceptions (like the studiopress, wordpress etc communities) many forum communities, well established and with large amounts of members seem to have gone inactive.

So it’s all a bit discouraging, and I was hoping to see a few examples of successful ones 🙂

[Robin W]

I’m sure there are plenty of highly active bbPress sites, with 20% of the world’s websites being wordpress they’re bound to be. That these people don’t come to the attention of a support site – and that this site only gets 20 queries a day – is surely testimony to how good the software is !!!