General category for each state?

[Wayne]

@GON made a post about traveling to Alaska. The state categories don't have a "general" forum, just more specific topics. The boondocking forums are mostly unused. What do you all think about converting "Boondocking - can you stay the night" to "General"? Or, adding a General forum and leaving Boondocking alone?

 

[MSCH]

Wayne, since you asked, here goes... , I think you have way too many forums for the amount of members..

you almost need the Dewey Decimal system and a card index to figure out where something goes or should be...

probably better to condense it to NE< SE< NW < SW and a few other options like General, Tow Vehicles etc.

it's the same problem BITOG has.. it might appeal to a certain subset who desire over organization and OCD topic specific minutiae but IMHO it's better to have a few subforums than to have one for every state and then 4 subgroups inside that state.. and a bunch of different maintenance subforums... its too much... my dos pesos worth of opinion..

 

[GON]

My two cents. Having a sub area for each state may encourage visitors to RVTHEUS to spend more time on the site, and maybe become a member.

A hypothetical example- if I did a google search on RVing in Utah and found a thread on this site, that is great, but that thread would not seamlessly have a collection on all Utah threads in one targeted area. But if all threads for Utah were in one specific area on this site, I may in fact go through more of the Utah threads.

If I am a visitor and see a random Utah thread, maybe I would not be as likely to join and post a question I had, as I would if their was a specific Utah section with dozens of threads on Utah specific RV discussions.

If the forum desires growth in members, targeted categories may be very beneficial in supporting growth. If the forum is not looking to grow, no reason to make specific categories, and not enough posts to make the "juice worth the squeeze".

Build it and they will come.

 

[Wayne]

The hope is that the forum keeps growing. I find it very difficult to start a new forum in our time with some many people using the likes of FB.

My philosophy with the design was along the lines of what GON said and I see no other RVing forum that is set up for each specific state. Time will tell if the forums succeeds.

 

[MSCH]

I don't know how you grow these old style forums.. Facebook you search for any specific topic and you get dozens of suggestions.

I admin 2 Forums on FB.. one of them was gifted to me , had about 5000 members... since it was gifted to me, I ended up doing a toxic bloodletting of more than 1000 of the most vocal critics of my triumphant coronation as Admin , simply because they thought they should be in charge and I wasn't going to tolerate all that toxic crap... funny thing is some of them said I would never be succesful; and they would start their own groups... blah blah blah... the only competing group I kept track of still has the original 200 members that departed ship at the same time... it has never grown...

starting the process with 4000 or so members I'm up to about 25000 now.. I dont have a way to check exactly when it was I took over... but it has to be at least 6 years.. the other forum we started from scratch and is a vehicle specific sales forum... it is past 50,000 members now, but it also appeals to every azznozzle in the world trying to sell crap and spam so I spend alot of time kicking people out or never letting them in to begin with....

the added benefit of Facebook is it is faster and easier to be found..... so you could put this forum on Facebook and possibly get a litte quicker growth..., which brings with it a different set of challenges.. ( Bots, Spammers and Fake Accounts )

 

[MSCH]

one last thing Wayne.. I just tried a Google search for this forum, and it doesn't even show up.. so at this stage you are strictly word of mouth.

RV The USA

 

[Wayne]

one last thing Wayne.. I just tried a Google search for this forum, and it doesn't even show up.. so at this stage you are strictly word of mouth.

Content is king and there isn't enough content yet. BITOG has 25 years of content and gets 150k unique visitors/day. The traffic to rvthe.us is increasing fairly rapidly from specific searches, but your search isn't specific enough. If you did the search rvthe us, then this site is the first item on the page. We will grow and gain membership, it will just take time and content.