Understanding user behaviour
Some forums naturally define themselves in such a way that users are likely to use them predictably; for example a Premiership football board that has a forum for each team. Supporters of a given team would tend to stick to their own forum to discuss anything at all, unless they specifically wanted to engage/taunt users of another Premiership club.
Neutrals would tend to go to the forum most appropriate for their subject matter, unless they had over time made friends on a given forum, i.e. they felt part of that sub-community. In other words their choice is either actively or subconsciously defined by either subject matter or a sense of belonging.
However for most message boards that sense of belonging is already defined simply by being there, as the message boards in many senses are the community. For example the message boards on an EastEnders fan site. In these cases users will tend to do one of three things:
- pick the forum with the most appropriate name for their subject matter
- pick the forum on which most other users post, regardless of name or subject matter
- use a forum that has been hijacked by a like-minded faction of the community to form their own sub-community
In general forum design should try to push users towards 1.
2 tends to happen for two main reasons: either there is no clear indication as to which forum is most appropriate for a specific topic, or that the user simply wants as many users as possible to see their post. Although this is mainly down to human nature, bad forum design simply exaggerates it, as quite naturally no one wants to be bothered writing something where no one else is likely to read it. Once the numbers get disproportionately high on one forum, the others tend to die (unless they cater for some niche market).
An example of this is confetti message boards [Figure 1]
Figure 1 - Visit Message boards
85% of all topics have been created on one forum, meaning it is going to be very difficult to use that forum effectively. Topics move so quickly - as many as 70 new ones per hour - that it would be nigh on impossible to find an old one for information after a couple of days, especially as topics with new posts move to the top of the list.
It is interesting that they do have other logical wedding-related forum names, but no one is really using them. This is almost certainly because the message board has passed its ‘tipping point’ where everyone predominantly uses one forum, an effect extremely common to online communities.
Another reason for virtually everything on one forum is that poor forum design makes it difficult to know where specific users are going to be.
An example of this is the no smoking site Click2Quit [Figure 2]
Figure 2 - Click here to visit
The problem here is that unless you know exactly what date someone gave up smoking on, you can’t tell what forum they are supposed to be posting on. It is also an artificial categorization of users: whilst there are indeed fundamental differences between Liverpool and Manchester United fans, there are no real fundamental differences between someone who gave up smoking 8 weeks ago, and someone who gave up 9 weeks ago.
As a consequence of this most users of this site only post on ‘First time on the discussion board’. What the owners could have done is identified that their categorization wasn’t working, and changed the forums before they reached ‘tipping point’.
Once the community has decided that they are all just going to use one forum, it can be difficult to change their behaviour; it is now implicitly part of how they behave as a community..
Conversely on Friends Reunited Connections the community split into 2 distinct factions. This is most likely because there is no defining commonality between them (Brides-to-be, Arsenal fans etc.), they are simply people who use Friends Reunited. One community mainly resides on ‘General Chat’ the other on ‘Debates & Discussions’; irrespective as to what their subject matter is.
Chat Moderators currently provide human moderation services to brand owners across Europe and North America.