Think of the future!

[Xyphien]

When making a website, you shouldn't ever be looking at the forum now. You should always be looking at the future with your forum. When you first open up your forum, one of the first things you should do is create base content/topics. This is because you're preparing for future conversations, and getting the people more active for the future. This is something you should be looking at, at all times. When you make an update to the forums, it should never be for the current forum. You should look at how it will effect and turn out in the future. Badges are a BIG things a lot of people don't look at with the future, so I will be using that as an example for this.

A lot of websites have badges, and most of them are manual badges. *Like our facebook page* *Subscribe to us on youtube* *Be a helpful and active member*. When you first make these badges, and get them set up 9 times out of 9.1 your website is new, and you figure having these will convince your members to get the badge by doing the items. Yes, this works, everyone on my forum strives to get badges and level up. However, when you have thousands of members, hundreds + joining a week, some of them being badge horders, now you're getting 20+ different people joining different social media for the badges, doing their best to get the helpful member badge. How do you really go through all of that, and add those people. Now you're getting PM's from members saying "where's my badge?" When you installed the plugin, and added these badges you were looking at the now, however in the future you will simply not be able to keep up with all of this.

This is why you should always prepare yourself, and think in depth on how every little thing you do on your forum will affect its future. I'm honest with my members, and when they submit an idea, I go through step by step, explaining my thought process behind it, and why I will be, or will not be adding the idea into the forums. After that, they always agree with my thought process, or give me ideas on how to change the circumstances. Which then you have to think about the different circumstances, and what could happen.

The thing about the future, is it's not guaranteed, which means you must think of all the different possibilities when adding anything new to the forum. Another example being a Chatroom. Every forum has been requested to add a chatroom at least once, if not, it will happen. Chatrooms are great, and lots of bigger forums have them, and it works. However, in the long term of a chatroom it can have devastating effects on communities. Just because one forum has it, doesn't mean it is good for yours. When you have a chatroom it can cause your discussions/posts to decrease, people will start talking on that more and not participate in the community. This means they might stop looking at the posts all together, which means they could miss vital information you push out. Missing information could lead to lack of participants in your event, lack of participants means lack of events, lack of events means that the few members who still post on don't have much of a reason to post on your site, etc. Those are extremes of it, but every little thing leads up to even bigger events.

An entertaining video example for this would be DirectTV ads:

It seems silly and cheese, but it is something you should always take into consideration with every small feature added. A few members asked to remove the automated emoticons, and because of that there are no longer any emotes used at all on my website. Emoticons I had customly made for the community, it's not a big deal now, but it removes a lot of the community type feel to the community, and a lot of people find it bland now to discuss. Because of that, it could have a negative effect on the community. Right now, I'm looking for a way to display the emotes under the message area, but I haven't been successful yet. Every edit, update, addon you add, etc. no matter how big or small will have an ever lasting effect on your community, either for the possitive, or negative. You can save a lot of long term headaches, and blocks along your way by simply looking into the future, and thinking about the long term and lasting effects of everything you posted.

One of the biggest benefits of this is it helps you from feeling discouraged in your forum. Many times your forum will not do as good as you want it to be, however, in thinking of the future of everything you do, you can feel like what you're doing is not for nothing. "When I spend at least an hour on SEO a day, it will eventually allow us to get ranked which will eventually lead to an active and striving community" Thoughts like this are way better than "Man... I'm wasting my time on this SEO, it's been 2 months and I haven't seen ANY results... this is a waste of time" These thoughts are often times what leads to forums shutting down. Once you have a doubting thought about your forum it's like a toxin in your head. You will start doubting everything about your forum, and what your doing. This initially is the main reason as to why forums die, and shut down. One the owner/staff start to doubt what they're doing, and think they're wasting their time, they stop giving the time. 9 times out of 10 your site will not magically explode, this means you will have to give a lot of your time on getting your forum up. This often times can take longer than a year, and when someone makes a website/forum they instantly think it will be huge. I've been managing a site of mine for going on 4 years now, and my 3 month old site has topped everything on the 4 year old site. Everything I've done differently on my new site I'm learning from. Once I get the site up to where it needs to be I'll be going back and re-applying everything to my older site and getting that up and running finally. The reason it has been up for that long and hasn't gotten much members is because I doubted myself a lot, and because of all of that the site has failed several times. This time, I'm simply putting it on the back burner until I can focus all my time and resources on it.



Sorry if I repeated myself a lot in this post, it's quite early, and I decided to write this up because it came to mind whilst replying to someone. I hope this helps you out, if it did please take the time to like this post, and comment below.