Tip #7- Want to start a new regional/ topical board?

Q: Do you know how 90% of successful boards started?
A: They all had 5 or more friends actively posting in the forum when it launched.

Regional/ special topic boards are tricky to start. You need all 3 ingredients to get them started:

  • a small group of committed posters.
  • they join/ start posting at roughly the same time.
  • they post regularly to attract new comers afterwards.

(The second point about them joining roughly the same time is to avoid the situation where a poster enthusiastically post something, got no response and discouraged and start drifting away, the third point is about the reality that others aren’t as inclined to participate if activity is slowing on a board.)

If you are interested in getting discussions or more discussions in your geographical area, here’s what you can do:

  • Ideally find a few committed food friends (e.g. user profile on old playground) if you know any and invite them to this site.
  • If you can’t find a few people, start a new thread on Site Thread titled e.g. ‘New Orleans board’, post that you are interested in getting the e.g. New Orleans board started and ask that anyone interested to commit to start the board and post regularly to express interest in the thread.
  • Once there are at least 4 or 5 committed posters as ‘founders’ of a regional board, start posting around the same time. Create a few topics each, post some recent reviews to get the discussions going.
  • We can carve out a board for your city/ region if there is sufficient interest.

You may say, well why not just start posting? Please do that too, but please register your interest as indicated above as well. The problem is that if interested user A post a review on the 1st. Interested User B sees the review on the 15th, doesn’t comment. Interested user C sees the review on the 30th, doesn’t comment. Users A, B, and C may all individually think that there is minimal interest in such a board.

But if users A, B, and C all express their interest in a thread and start talking around the same time, we can avoid the problem of ‘the illusion of lack of interest due to time lag in interested users coming onto the site.’

Happy posting!

1 Like

Why has D.C. & Baltimore been lumped into Greater Philadelphia?

Because nobody post in DC / Baltimore anyway. so the Philly DC Baltimore board is in reality the Philly board.