Exercise 6 - Hoot Suite Preview

Anonymity and Community

Anonymity can both help and hurt your forum. Providing easy access creates more traffic. It also lets user open up a little more. On the other hand, some users might abuse this privilege, filling your forums with obscenities and nonsense. Securing your forum can cause traffic to lower, but the information will be much more valuable to the users. basically quality instead of quantity.

In order to offer a secure forum, you have to offer the user something, otherwise they'll just keep moving. the internet is fast-paced, and if you don't give a reason for a user to sign up, they simply won't. On top of this, make the sign up effortless. The less time it takes to sign in, the less time it takes for a user to give up on the idea.

An article from alistapart.com gives some great examples of bettering your forum through membership. My personal favorite would be the reputation system. I use this quite frequently on e-bay. It lets me know who I can trust and who I cannot. e-bay also emails you about the user after purchase, basically forcing the issue to rate them.

Email confirmation, Rating system and Reputation systems, for me, are the best way to verify your forum's legitimacy.