I have played with the thought off and on. Moderating a busy player forum worries me.
I wouldn’t want to have a forum where posters just scream: casino XXX rips me off! casino YYYYY steals my money! and so on and so on. And they all seem to turn into that. We have enough complaint forums out there.
Then there is the incentivised forum – post and I will get you a better bonus. Post and I will get you some free monmey in your account. I want no part of that either – you end up with so many bonus hunters.
Also, there are very few forums out there that are actually profitable.
If I had a forum I would want it to be similair to this one, but for players. I would want it to be informative, discuss the best way to play the various games etc.
Building up something like that would take very active moderating, with several moderators joining in to actively giude posts and contribute. I just don’t have the time to do that. I moderate here and at Aff Community, and I post at two or three other forums fairly regularly. I consider these professionally important for me and wouldn’t give them up.
So, I have a lot of concerns. But – the thought is and always has been intriguing, if it’s going to be done right. Perhaps there could be individual forums with rss feeds making the posts from elsewhere appear….
I am intrigued….
Dom – you and I think along similar lines. I’d want it to be primarily discussion based and would be prepared to set rules and administer with perhaps one or two o6ther webmasters (who’d like to) moderating specific forums in a similar manner.
I’ve een looking into syndication MODs and could definately do something here. Also, have installed a mod that allows remote posting which i am trying to re-mod to also allow posting-by-email, auto-posting from RSS feeds along with otgoing topic notifications.
As you say, the key is to make it a proper discussion centre and there are ways to encourage this – I set up and ran one for musicians which is a difficult base and got it working well so feel i could do it here too.
I was thinking about banners and its probably best to keep affiliate marketing banners off it altogether to start with and concentrate entirely on discussion, but promote the websites of participating webmasters instead via Sigs etc.
kwblue: the filters option is a nice idea. I can mod it to display posts from a specific forum remotely easily enough but as for content matter it would require some sort of classification if it wasn’t in a specific forum. The answer here would be to set up three generic “casino game” forums for slots, table games and video poker to supplement Bingo and Poker forums, then you could plug into that.
However its best to start with as few a number of forums as possible to get people congregated, then to spread it out so perhaps one could compromise: start with the generic forum and then when its split, re-feed from the Slots forum?
Keep the ideas coming.
Simmo!