How you define success depends a lot on what the objective of the forum is. A support forum, for example, may count itself succcessful if posted questions are answered quickly and correctly, and if the community develops a core of knowledgeable posters other than company staff.

I haven't seen quantitative measures of community success, but certainly general indicators would be vigorous dicussion, growing membership with many members remaining in the community, etc. Indicators of lack of success would be many unanswered posts, conversations that die before they get very far, and not many members sticking around for very long.

I presume that both the moderators and the quality of their initiating posts, to attract other users, in building interesting content, is critical.

An idea which I had ( nothing new i expect ) is to allow moderators that offer complimentary services in their own business' to display a free advert for their business via their profile ie advertise their company/personal authority.

Then have them contact "early adopters" via a push and pull strategy, with emails to key people to respond to the post. Some comments which would act as bait, would be key, I would have thought.

What's the best way to attract quality moderators and contributors?

What's the best way to motivate and secure the moderators loyalty for the long haul?

[edited by: Whitey at 12:30 am (utc) on Mar. 10, 2007]

What's the initial approach, i really don't have a clue in doing this "expertly".

I'm thinking of working this through the planning stages with a marketing consultant, familiar with "building communities" which hopefully will result in a well implimented forum. What are the initial budgets i should be looking at, assuming nothing too complicated:

I thought:

- 2 days sit down discussion/planning/strategy $1200
- Software recommendation based on above for tasks strategy/identified $200 by a seperate expert
- Implimentation and software $300
- Initial training and moderator support over 1 month $50 per hour say 10 hours

And then what would the operational budgets be [ i guess it depends a lot on the activity levels ]. But in broad terms, what would the line items be:

-Server costs / administrator
-SEO
-Programmer
-Moderators
-Motivating remuneration for key contributors

Have i missed something, is there a better way to do this?

Lots of questions in there, Whitey... be sure to review the Community Building Library for past discussions of these topics.

Good moderators will emerge as you build a strong community - you may find it difficult to recruit mods early on (or even identify who would be good). For the first few months, or even the first year, you may be able to handle mod duties yourself. It all depends on the level of activity and how quickly it grows. The good thing is that if you have a lot of activity you should be able to spot some potential mods.

The rates you are describing for professional community building help sound low... but if someone with good credentials will work for those rates you will probably benefit from that assistance.

The rates you are describing for professional community building help sound low

What is the market rate for these approximately .... it was just a "thumb suck" that i put up.

It's hard to define "typical" rates due to the relatively small number of community building experts, but I'd say rates would generally be similar to very specialized web developers or business consultants.

I have a custom designed community. I need a forum that can use the existing user database and allow members to post messages using their nickname without the need to register again to the forum.
What solution can you recommend? Something that is easy to integrate.
Technology can be LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP or Perl).

Hmmm, Zoltan, I've gone the other direction - used the forum userbase and authentication system to drive other site features. I took that approach mainly because the forum was established and because it had a variety of control features (email authentication, re-authentication required for new email, image verification, etc.) Chances are, you could have someone code a hack that would push new users and changes from your database into a forum database.

One issue to consider is that most forums have various levels of users - unverified members, regular members, members with penalties/restrictions, moderators, admins, etc. If you want your other software to drive user setup and authentication, you'll have to figure out how to make the member type and status in the forum work. COPPA verification (kids under 13 need parental permission to join) is another consideration, though it seems that COPPA has been weakened by judicial rulings.

.... I've been digging around on some fantastic forums over the week as a user, getting the feel of things and preparing for this "forums" project.

At the moment I have an e-marketing guy drawing up some early stage plans, but as always i want to be a step ahead to ensure we are heading the right way.

A couple of things, in the "ABC" stages:

Integrated solution versus better software

- I can clearly see that established board software like vbulletin and phpBB are full of great features and easier to use, but we have an exisitng front end management CMS to organise our e-commerce on the front end and I don't want to intergrate seperate solutions.

Why?

Because I'll have to deal with seperate developers with all the headaches that causes.

Is that sound thinking or am I not thinking out of the square?

The system that we look like using is Gossamer Forums, which seems a fair way behind the others. I wondered if anyone's been faced with a similar integration issue and can comment on making do with something like GT's product.

Moderator Guidelines

Again I was looking out for some models to observe that declared the moderator guidelines and the incentive structures [ voluntary ] as a benchmark.

The one that impressed me the most was "FlyerTalk" which is mentioned on some other recent post.

Does anyone have any top quality benchmarks that they have worked to?

Roger, actually the website is using a custom script. It is a dating website, and I coded it 95% alone. Now, I would like to add a forum functionality to increase interaction between members. The thing is I would not want to code a forum script from scratch since there are many available forums free or paid. The question is: what script offers me the best way to integrate my existing userbase? I do not want the members to have 2 different usernames and passwords.