Surfing The World Wide Waves, a weekly article

Discussion forums

When people spend a lot of time online they become very familiar with the world wide web and in so doing they require and more interactivity. One method of getting more interaction with people is through discussion forums. From a webmaster point of view these are great because the worry of providing content is far less critical than with conventional websites. The site administrator now becomes more of a moderator than a creator of content. He has to find a topic of discussion and encourage traffic to the site but after a certain amount of time he/she may be able to gain a lot.

When looking at sites such as ancientworlds for example the topic is the Roman civilization for which several thousand lines of code are used taking advantage of PHP in order to make it interactive. The interactivity gained from this site aimst towards a specialised audience who work as a community to make the site more interesting. Over a period of time when the audience increases so does the load on the servers and the amount of work requires someone dedicating their time to the maintenance of the site. A few choices for trying to make the activity may include making the site paying for certain luxuries such as the amount of communication you may do in one day for example.

Other discussion forums such as The Flipside and Nochicktrix may aim towards another audience which is more interested in image manipulation and decay as an art form within a more european group of people. With sites such as Nochicktrix though it is going towards a more american timezone and the content changes to news stories and more.

We find that the context of the discussion group affects to a great deal the form of comments on the discussion group, for example with websites with news content such as the BBC we find that the content is screened before being added to the discussion therefore the quality of the comments may be much higher than seeing forums such as those mentioned above.

An occurence which I have found interesting is inter-site rivalry as was shown through certain members of The Flipside and Akpcep. Members may begin to see a way in which they think the sites may be run more efficiently and that is the moment at which there may be the need for that person to start a new discussion forum of his own and this may be quite interesting because of the coming of permanent high speed connections.

Hope to add more with time, if you'd like to share your own mis fortunes then don't hesitate to contact me