The best tool for online communities

9 January 2012 by Greg Lexiphanic | 4 Comments

There are a lot of remarkable tools for building online communities nowadays. They let your community members upload all kinds of content, and allow them to interact with each other in a whole host of different ways. They get flagged and notified; they get embedded and updated; there’s videos to watch, sounds to listen to, questions to answer, articles to link to, walls to post on… and so much more.

Where would we be without all these great community building tools that have sprung up in the past five years?

My answer: We’d probably have more interesting and genuine online communities.

Before I continue, this post is inspired in part by Patrick O’Keefe’s first post of the year: There is Not Enough Time in the Day for Me to Tell You That Forums Are Not Dead. As Patrick says, everyone keeps declaring that forums are dead but the reality is that they’re not.

If I was asked to build a community but I could only use one tool (or platform or whatever you want to call it), my answer would be a forum (also known as a message board or discussion board – all the same thing).

Here are the reasons why I would choose a forum:

1. They’re easy to understand
   Potential new community members can get an idea of what’s going on very quickly. Everything is organised hierarchically and it’s easy to drill down into threads. Here’s a fun test: ask your mum (the perennial computer novice) to make a post on Facebook and on a forum. From my own personal experience with my mum, she was posting to forums of her own accord without me ever showing her how; she still doesn’t “get” Facebook.
2. Low barrier to participation
   Other tools want you to add a profile picture, find your friends and, once all that’s out of the way, you still have to find the community you wanted to be a part of and like, follow or join it. Joining a forum is very easy (which is why so many were plagued with spambots for so long). At the very least you pick a username, prove you’re human (spam countermeasures), verify yourself with an email address, and you can start posting.
3. Highly transparent and easy to find
   It’s public, it shows up on Google and it’s easy to search. All the participation and interaction happens out in the open (private messaging still exists in case you need some privacy). I cannot count the number of times I’ve searched for an answer to a specific problem and found the answer in a forum via a Google search.
4. Easy to participate, easy to lurk, easy to avoid
   Forums are independent. They’re not (usually) a sub-feature of some larger network. If you want to participate, you go to the forum. If you want to look but not participate, you go to the forum. If you don’t want to see anything about the forum, you don’t go to the forum. Facebook and Twitter are set up so that, even if you stop following, you’ll still see others sharing or retweeting it after you’ve “left”.
5. Potential for unlimited interaction
   What’s great about the “pure” aspect of forums is that there’s nothing stopping you from using a thread for whatever you want. Want to run a Q&A? Start a thread with a question. Want to add a knowledge base, start a thread with “How to…”. If these are more important parts of your online presence, you might want to use dedicated tools for those purposes instead, but if you just need something ad hoc for now, your forum can do it.
   Plus, if your members want to express themselves further, they can. Signatures, avatars, post ratings, “gamification”: these have all been present in forums for years.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for other tools; they’re all part of the rich ecosystem we call the Internet. They all have their uses and those uses are often very useful.

If you’re starting a community, start with the basics — a space for people to talk — then you can layer in more complex features as you need them.