What Do Forums Need?

It is interesting that this has become about long posts because I just went through all three pages of this thread, searching for uses of the word "long" and the only time that I have used the word in reference to long posts was in the opening post of this thread, on February 11 of last year, more than a year ago. Other than that, I spoke about long-tailed keywords, about the importance of splitting long paragraphs up into short bits for easier reading, and made other uses of the word, such as long as, but the references that I made to the length of someone's posts was to state, more than a year ago, that in posts that are only one or two lines long, the search engines have difficulty determining what the discussion is supposed to be about, or in deciding whether it is worthwhile even to include in its index, and I stand by that because it's a fact.

My last suggestion was about content, in the hopes of encouraging people or giving ideas about what might be perfect topics for the forum. Someone mentioned in the past few posts that we are not very many and, although the forum has been growing, this is true. I don't know if I want the forum to become huge but I would like it to become larger than it is and, having run several forums before, I know that a healthy forum needs to be replenished with new people from time to time, by which I mean adding new people to the mix, not replacing the ones that are already here.

I also know that a forum, such as this, needs to have a mixture of useful, insightful, and meaningful content as well as threads that are silly or fun, intended purely for entertainment, largely because the silly stuff doesn't tend to have a focused topic, is usually not indexed by the search engines, and does not serve to bring new people into the forum. That doesn't mean that they are wrong, or that I am suggesting you not do that, but that discussion forums should more closely represent the people who are participating in them, and I believe that while we may all have our silly moments, these are not the sum of our experiences.

We've all probably known someone who never seems to be serious. Everything is a joke, and nothing seems to effect them in any meaningful way. While these people may be fun to be around, it is hard to think of them as friends or to feel as if we actually knew them. That's because real people aren't like that.

We also think, and do, practical things, and have learned skills either by experience, through trial and error, or from other people, books, films, etc. These should also have a place in this forum. We have also learned things that have helped us to become who we are, and not all of these things are silly or entertaining, yet there is a place here for these experiences to be shared. That's what my last post was about and yes, in most cases these topics are going to require more than one or two lines, but I wasn't discussing the length of posts.

There is also a place for the silly threads, as they help keep people here, and nowhere have I suggested that there was anything wrong with them.

 

Of course, you don't know the people who have created the web sites or the videos where you might get information, either. Your statement that if you want factual information you will Google it is precisely what I am talking about, though. When forum posts are based on discernible topics, they come up when someone Googles the topic, and that's what we need in order to bring new people here.

When I first bought a Mac after several years of using a Windows based machine, I would often Google questions that I had about using the Mac and since I had already tried reading the manual, the most useful places that I found on my searches were Mac-oriented forums. That's still the case, as I am trying to figure out how to do something that I don't do on a regular basis, or when I am having a problem that I am trying to figure out with the computer or one of the apps that I am using, and my searches often bring up Mac forums that have the answers that I am looking for. You may not take advice from people you don't know, but many of us do, especially when the people we do know don't have the answers we're looking for.