Why you shouldn’t add a forum

Personally I think adding a forum to your website is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.

A blog post by Grego advising people on how to create a half decent forum, if they insist on having one, reiterated many of the points I had spinning around in my head.

There is no point in adding a forum to a site where it won’t be used, and as Grego and I have both mentioned before clone forums suck. Currently my sites have a grand total of zero forums – and I am quite proud of that. It shows I am not prepared to waste my time setting up forums with rows upon rows of empty boards. Of course this leaves me to waste my time on other matters and also shows that none of my sites are popular enough to warrant having a forum.

One of the sites which I run, an Internet Marketing site which specialises in sending raw traffic to sponsors sites, did have a forum – however now it doesn’t. Quite frankly a forum for a small site is more trouble than it is worth, especially if – as was the case here most of the posts on the forum were just spam.

Often I see forums with rows upon rows of zeros down the page – for the topic and post counts, or perhaps rows and rows of single digits numbers from a grand total of 3 or 4 members. Sure, forums do have a part to play in communicating online. GMKing’s forums are probably the smallest forums I visit and they do certainly serve a purpose. But the number of people who will waste time creating advert-ridden, poorly designed, buggy, and downright pointless forums still amazing me. These people expect others to come and visit their site and build a community. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work like that – build and they will follow. Build content that is, not an empty forum.

Now what did this post have to do with Game Maker?

No idea, but many users of Game Maker produce these forums.