People who never owned a membership site and would often ask if they can have a membership site of their own. They would then come up with big ostentatious plans for their site, wanting to incorporate each and every aspect just like the membership website of a large society. They wish for features such as forums, blogs, chat and other applications that allow them to interact with each other and even outside the platform. So at least, do membership sites needs a forum to enable members to interact with each other?
First, before acquiring a membership site one must consider the ease they will have in the deliverance of the product and the ease people will enjoy in accessing your information. I have no idea what you encounter, but often, whenever I dare any downloadable materials from within a forum, the channels to use are often clumsy, its tedious to find the material and hard to navigate within the site. To make your information more accessible, acquire a blog and avail downloads here. It is advisable not to have a forum in your membership site, but you can go ahead and have one if it is your conviction.
Do ponder over this though. How easy will it be to control the debates? From the many membership sites forum have seen, forums generally fall in to two classes. One, it is inactive with very few posts, months or years apart and looks awful because it implies no one posts or reads, hence discourages one from posting.
The second type is whereby the forum enjoys too online traffic for its own good. In this instance, some of your bloggers post everywhere, squabbles, and you can only watch, there is nothing else you can do.
Can you control the debate? For a blog, the answer is often affirmative but not for a forum. This is because forum owners avail 50 diverse subdivisions but people are active on may be only two. Most of the posts made bypass the administrator’s attention; hence people take over the forum and post everywhere.
I propose that that you acquire a regular blog, where you can sort the really good comments, from the off-topic posts that can then classified and posts. Copy-paste the comment into the posts’ section and change its author to the person who made the comment.
Try using the Move Comment plug-in post all comments after the post. By the use of this technique, bloggers can still hold discussions on new topics but the administrator controls and maintains an understandable linear format for people to still drip it out, and the information represented is organized.
Once this is done, the topics can then be moved to the membership site for the simple ones to come right away. Additionally, you will be able to see your regular contributors who make good comments and posts, and change them from subscribers to contributors.
By doing so, you control who can post on your membership site by approving posts. Hence, before creating a membership site forum, I would advise one to start by creating a regular membership site using a WordPress blog with the required plugins. It will ease delivery, accord you control over the debates, and let you choose to endorse good blog remarks in to blog posts.
Go to http://www.membershipcube.com to find out more.