Rebirth of The Fourum
19 October 2010
You may have seen that tonight we “fired” the guy who updated the fourum over the summer and through the beginning of the school year till today. This is a clever publicity stunt designed by the one and only fourum updater (@mrN8warner). He wasn’t really fired nor has it really ever not been him updating (except for the few occasions he was not able to).
Turns out we were just being lazy, all of our metrics have been declining except the ones on facebook thanks to our recent ad campaign and this caused us to slack. So in an attempt to mount a massive comeback (with Version 2 Launching sometime in Jan/Feb) we are attempting to course correct and make it seem as if we are remaking ourself.
It also seems that just asking your users to invite their friends has been incredibly useful. We gained around 50 users from advertising in five days and asking our users to invite their friends to “like” our facebook page gained us about the same amount in five days. Of course to see results like this you need to have many people “liking” the page so a combination of advertising for steady increase and users and asking your users to invite their friends every once in a while may be the best option here.
We’ll see how this “rebirth” of the fourum works to encourage new users.
I have also been thinking about a few new features for the fourum version 2:
Game mechanics: The more engaged you are (submitting, commenting, liking, etc) on facebook or the website the more points you earn to various badges (ex: most talkative, most engaging, likable, etc). These badges are posted to user facebook profiles and twitter accounts which will encourage virility. Also leader boards on thefourum.com will encourage users to compete with their friends and others.
Linking to facebook: We have a half-assed facebook integration currently. It works through tumblr and posts submissions to our facebook page. I want to harvest these likes and comments from facebook and bring them to thefourum.com. Also, adding the ability to like and comment on fourum posts on our website that will post to a user’s facebook profile or twitter will encourage virility.
Voting on submissions: Similiar to digg, all submissions will be posted to the site without initial moderation. They will be voted on and the ones that are the best make it to the homepage each day. There will be a report button to remove slanderous or bad material and force it to be moderated and approved before it goes back on the site. This would make the site mostly unmoderated and it will be useful to users more than just once a day.
That’s all I got right now after thinking about it for a short period of time. I am sure I am missing some key features but these are the ones that came to mind and probably most important.
**Update 1 (10/27): **More feature ideas
iFrame Widgets for other websites. To make it very easy for other websites to add our fourum content to their websites we will make widgets similiar to facebook’s. These widgets will be both individual posts and content areas like a sidebar for your website that will grab the latest fourum updates and be filterable such as turning explicit language on/off, number of posts to show, etc. These posts will link to our site in a new window and also have like/comment/tweet ability if you are logged in to the fourum. If not, you will see an option to sign up.