Social & Community

Thread Description:
Profile spamming, the act of signing up usernames at forums for the sole purpose of gaining the benefit of a link to your website from the profile your new account generates can be a big problem. Anyone that's run even a small forum for some time will tell you it can be a real pain in the arse.
Over at wmw they're discussing ways to thwart the spammers in phpBB - Some outstandign links to mods for the phpBB system and advice from Threadwatch members encyclo and Jenstar - this from Jenstar:

There is a phpbb mod which temporarily disables the website URL field, and if a bot tries to enter something into that form field, it bans the IP and username. The bot doesn't "view" the page and assumes the website url field must be there when it sends the registration information to the server. However, a real visitor would see no form field for website, and instead a note about it becoming active after registration is confirmed.

Good stuff for community admins...

Thread Description:
Forresters Charlene Li has an interesting post about how AA/Razorfish use blogs and social media for knowledge management, peer review and team collaboration.

"Forrester envisions a day when new employees on their first day will be handed a sheet of paper with their phone number, email address — and a URL for their blog. The company would give all of its employees a personal internal blog where they could provide project updates, trip reports, and market intelligence — anything that they think others should know about the work that they are doing. This information could then be tied into the company's VoIP phone system — for internal calls, the caller's photo, title, bio, and a link to his blog would appear on the computer screen. The blog content would give context and background for the call, making it unnecessary to send extra emails or to have extensive discussions about a project."

Thread Description:
Friendster have 13M members, eHarmony, the 5th largest dating networ,k claim 9000 marriages. What does this mean? - Huge amounts of $$$'s one would think eh?

The tie-up between eHarmony and Friendster comes as competition in the online dating sector intensifies, forcing sector participants to get bigger and find new ways to stand out in a crowd.
Consumer spending on online personals was $235.3 million in the first half of 2004, up from $214.3 million in the first half of last year, according to the Online Publishers Association and comScore Networks.

Thread Description:
This thread at v7n takes a few posts to get going but has some nice views on phpBB vs vBulletin with a very neat list of links at msg12 - ive messed with both and have to vote vBulletin...

Thread Description:
Running a forum on your ecom site or thinking about starting a community to increase visitors and sales? - This thread over at HighRankings has some pretty good stuff to offer for anyone that's considering building a community for whatever reason.
JeffSmith NH is pretty new to this judging by his list of questions. One of those questions includes:

Other than the obvious benefit of adding a valuable service to clients, what are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing a forum? How does the forum impact SEO?

Following on are some great general tips and strategies for bootstrapping a community and maintaining a forum. There are lots of good posts but i'll quote you Renegade Master to give you an appetizer for this topic:

1) If your site has a topic for users to discuss, then it will be used. Product based forums will generally be drop-in/drop-out, a theme will guarantee returns.
2) Building loyalty when there is little activity will be tough, it's at this stage you'll have lots of work to do. You could try to be a little controversial, to encourage discussion, and get people returning to see replies to their posts and others to view the latest replies.
3) You will probably have many more browsers to posters. I haven't worked out a method for convertersion, let me know if you do. You could have a newby category for people to test posting and see how it works.
4) You should try to make the forum easy to use, have functions that show all posts since last login or last refresh. Allow users to unsubscribe from some categories they are not interested in.
5) I also think having less buttons and clutter is a good design, the design used at UKClimbing is good.
6) Allow some level of personalisation such as nicknames and profiles.

The general consensus runs along the lines of it's damn hard work but can potentially reap large rewards.

Thread Description:
Search Guild have an experiment going where their members can get an advanced profile - Kind of like an editable extension of the usual stuff you see in a forum profile. Cost: $40
Chris thinks they can do it without attracting spammers, im not so sure :) but the fee should help for sure...
What do you think? Will inviting members to list their services and post up to 3 urls increase posts and give a little back to those that contribute or is it gonna be a spam fest?

Thread Description:
This isn't a highly technical description of how to do this, but then again, I'm not a highly technical guy. It's nice to have some good ideas to PASS to the technical guys when problem users arise. Those really annoying trolls can be a real pain, so it's nice when you can make it difficult for them to be difficult. keyplyr suggests a nice simple way to keep away some of those difficult users in one fell swoop.

Thread Description:
"Did you ever launch a forum only to watch it die a prompt or slow, agonizing death?"
It's a familiar story to the old forum refugees. Having pointed many times to Clay Shirky's "own worst enemy" article (you can search, find it youself), I'm not sure if the death spiral can be broken --extended perhaps.

Alexa graphs and the big bad bell curve:

ihelpyouservices
webmasterworld
cre8asiteforums
searchenginewatch
v7n
highrankings