Do you use the forums on your site(s)?

If you do and have good participation, please share with us what you believe is the key to your success.

Let's see how many positive replies we receive... positive replies only, please. Thanks!

Looking forward to some replies, Gwen. Unfortunately, I can't get people to participate in these at all. I don't know what would help! We had great participation when we had a free "My Family" website re-purposed for the class. Will be anxious to hear some success stories!

DKD

I am a guest on this site:

http://www.brazosport68.com/member_logout.cfm

And they use the message forum quite a bit.
You could contact them and see if you get a response.

I would say we have had success with our forum. We have 839 pages going. Not real sure how it all happened. In the beginning people would do a "Do you remember (something, some place or some body) and it would take off from there. Then others would find a picture of a place in town that has been gone for years and they would guess/talk about the picture. It just grew from there. We average 20 - 30 different people a day and about 50 a week, with about 80 each month. Winter brings more in. All of these people don't post but they are always looking to see what is going on. Sometimes it is something silly as well as a place they can keep up with those with health problems. Anything goes except politics. Or maybe our class is a gabby group.

This is one area where I've been trying to get creative. We have about 10 classmates who talk with each other a lot. None of us were friends in high school. Our friendships began on the CC site. We were using the Message Forum, but they were a little uncomfortable with having ALL of our conversations available to the entire class. There's the concern about spelling and grammar, and making everything perfect for all to read. One of the girls set up a private group on Facebook and we've been using that with great success!

We'd really prefer to use our site for these conversations so I've been trying to figure out how to set up a private group room on CC. Chat won't work, as they like to post any time of day. It appears I could password protect a Forum Post and we could chat in there, but I'm concerned about notices that go out to classmates who signed up to learn about all new forum posts, only to arrive and find a password protected listing.

Our private Facebook group has been extremely successful, sharing memories and forging some wonderful new friendships. It is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for in the forums. I would have preferred to have these conversations be available to all, but it just wasn't happening.

I'm still posting in our forum and members of our private group will post answers there too. My thought is that if a new classmate joins us in the the forum, we could invite them to the private group.

Any thoughts on this idea would be appreciated....