Well today I went a bit mad and made some new fora for boards.org.uk. I was surprised that I got very little response when I asked for ideas for new fora so I've mostly gone with my own ideas

These are the new fora:

Abroad
Healthy living and Fitness
Mac
Radio

I won't provide links here, a bit of forum browsing won't do anyone any harm

We don't have many users yet but we do have the core users and between us we generate a lot of content! I'm glad to see you guys returning all the time, it's good to have ye here.

Well, we partied into the night and now it's time to clear up the empty beer bottles, crushed beer cans, sweep up the spent party poppers and rearrange the furniture.

That's right folks, it's the day after the boards.org.uk birthday party. Okay, there wasn't actually a party but it was a good milestone to have reached

So, time to reflect on what's happened over the last year. Well in the earliest days of the site there was lots of activity, a load of new users signed up and amazingly some of them still post!!

We banned Polmki and his numerous alternative accounts which is actually a pity because I've a feeling that the guys is actually quite smart and could be a good contributer if he could banish the troll within.

Care to have a look at what I am selling? http://boards.org.uk/forums/forumdisplay.php?forumid=27

Internet forums attract plenty of users who want to discuss any number of topics. Their popularity has never waned, from the days of the earliest bulletin boards. It's testimony of peoples willingness to communicate their thought, ideas and feelings on a huge range of topics.

I use several forum sites worldwide, some like boards.org.uk and boards.ie are generalised with many forum categories, one site I use is specifically dedicated to book-lovers, another for writers, I also frequent tenpin bowling forums, Audio visual forums and a Call of Duty 4 PS3 clan forum.

One thing most forum sites have in common is that they are targets for viral marketing and shills. Some viral marketing is very direct, an employee from the marketing department of a company will start a new thread to say how great their product is.

Forum lurkers are people who log into web forums on a regular basis, read the content but never post. I've been thinking about lurkers a lot recently because there are quite a few on boards.org.uk. :)

Some of the lurkers have registered accounts, log into their accounts, read but don't post. Other lurkers I just recognise by IP address only. I'm the kind of person who likes to share my opinion...in case you didn't already know ;) I like to discuss anything and everything. I'm passionate about some subjects and merely have a passing interest in others. Either way, I can't resist posting on my favourite forums and contributing to the community.

There's always a temptation to create new fora on this site, especially ones suitable to my own personal interests! However, right now, we have enough fora and categories to cover our userbase and while there have been some good suggestions, there just aren't enough users yet to warrant new fora.

I've actually been thinking recently, that it might be a good idea to remove some of the existing fora considering the complete lack of threads and posts. I feel this might make the site look less empty if there are less fora. I'll discuss this with the other Admins and get their opinion.

So when are new fora warranted? In my own view, any new forum on boards.org.uk should be created from the existing body of threads. Right now, I can see a case for having an 'Apple' or 'Mac' forum as a sub-forum of Computers based on the number of threads in that forum that are dedicated to Apple Mac(intosh) computers. Admittedly, I've started a few of them ;) but Mac has always, rightly or wrongly, had it's own dedicated followers (of fashion?) :)

So boards.org.uk is almost one year old. \o/ For those of you with a historical bent, the very first discussion thread can be found here.

Given the fact that it's almost one year since the site opened, I'll be gathering site statistics and posting them here on this blog on February 12th.

It's great to see people posting on the site and it's nice to see that we are retaining our members. It's also interesting to see that boards.org.uk has a number of lurkers who return to the site at least once a week but who rarely post. I've notices that some have never posted but have started replying and then stopped. If you guys are reading this then please do post...we don't bite

The first of many posts I hope...

John.
--