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I would agree. If you have tons of content already, using a feed or news groups to just compliment the data is fine. When you do it to make that the majority of your content, it takes away from any unique discussion.
I think the newsfeed is dependent on the context. How do they work exactly? Do you just get a feed in form of a thread, revealing news?
As if it's automatic news feeders, I've seen that these type of threads work on some forums, whilst on others it doesn't. What I mean by working, is that people get involved in the actual thread and discuss it thereafter with others. In a few forums where i have seen this happen, is based on people starting their own news topics, so I guess in a sense there is no automatic feed involved there. I have seen one, where it has had 50/50 activity on it, where a news thread feed comes in, and a few reply, but most of the time, no one rarely replies. Other forums where I have seen this automatic feed involved, it has been unsuccessful to the point of people not replying at all and you just get pages of the news feeds. Members may read this, and who is to say it's handy, it's really up to whoever takes interest either in reading or replying to it.
I don't think post count, or raising the amount of content on your site with a news feed makes a significant impact on a site. It is evident it may help, but I think it won't be nearly as much value as producing your own content. At the end of the day, it's down to the owner and the forum's natural progression. I think the news feed is worthy of a test drive nonetheless, as it can be handy to see if it works or not in your forum, just by observing how it integrates and how people react to it.
I know of a few sites that have literally HUNDREDS of thousands of news feed posts and almost no other posts. for example http://www.bike-forums.com/ . Now I am not putting this site down, just using it as an example. I don't think a regular user can even post in the news feed generated threads. What in the world is the point to that? You can't even post in the threads and participate.
I guess I think it is an artificial way to make a site look busier then it is and if you never grow the actual rest of your forum you really don't have much of anything as far as a community goes. Just my thoughts.....
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TVDinner wrote: I know of a few sites that have literally HUNDREDS of thousands of news feed posts and almost no other posts. for example http://www.bike-forums.com/ . Now I am not putting this site down, just using it as an example. I don't think a regular user can even post in the news feed generated threads. What in the world is the point to that? You can't even post in the threads and participate.
I guess I think it is an artificial way to make a site look busier then it is and if you never grow the actual rest of your forum you really don't have much of anything as far as a community goes. Just my thoughts.....
I agree. Posts made by normal members will quickly get buried by the vast number of auto-generated posts created by the feeds.
It's fine to have a section just for feeds. Sections where normal users post should not have feeds.
SMF forum software do RSS to post MOD. I think you need to run a Crone Job to make it work because doing it via SMF caused high serverload for more than one feed per day.
I personally think it is a great way of adding content to discuss about if dont lightly to encourage participation.
But i certainly wouldnt do more than 20 posts per day from a newsfeed. Any more and it overtakes the forums and shuts out regular posters.
Maybe a forum like "News and Current Affairs" would benefit from maybe 2 or 3 newsfeed posts per day to get people discussing the news.
I use news feeds to help out our news forum. I have them all sent to a hidden forum only I can access, and then move the threads I want to be discussed into the public area.
It's a great help, and saves time looking for fresh news topics.
As far as using them as a primary source of content... I would strongly recommend against it. Not only is it rather dull, but I BELIEVE that Goggle can penalize you, for duplicate content.
I don't use feeds at all. I used to use a feed that was linked to (I believe) WordPress, so a topic that I posted there would also be posted on in the announcements forum, but I've just decided to post them all myself in that forum. I don't see the point of them really.
Actually I'd like to have some newsfeed posts in one of my forums (don't worry, I'd confine it to one section)... anyone have a recommended way of doing this in vBulletin?
TVDinner wrote: I know of a few sites that have literally HUNDREDS of thousands of news feed posts and almost no other posts. for example http://www.bike-forums.com/ . Now I am not putting this site down, just using it as an example. I don't think a regular user can even post in the news feed generated threads. What in the world is the point to that? You can't even post in the threads and participate.
I guess I think it is an artificial way to make a site look busier then it is and if you never grow the actual rest of your forum you really don't have much of anything as far as a community goes. Just my thoughts.....
Maybe they think it will help with the search engines and all that. Or perhaps they hope for viewers to use their site as a newspaper so to speak. Those are my guesses. I guess it could be to attract people due to activity but that seems like a lame way to do it, as you pointed out.
we agree on this one. the main thing that bothers me about that example is that you (me, you, a normal member) can not post in the news feed threads. So even if they post something interesting, you can not make a follow up post that might even get other regular members posting about the topic. that is my main complaint with it, other then the artificial boosting of post counts.
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TVDinner wrote: we agree on this one. the main thing that bothers me about that example is that you (me, you, a normal member) can not post in the news feed threads. So even if they post something interesting, you can not make a follow up post that might even get other regular members posting about the topic. that is my main complaint with it, other then the artificial boosting of post counts.
That IS ridiculous. Users should be able to post in those threads. I can't believe there is no option to keep them open, and that they have to be closed. hatever:
IGI is a religious forum, and we used newsfeeds and other forums to give ourselves a few more posts, but we did this moderately.
We had an off limits board accessible only to Admin and the Paperboy account. Religious news items and original posts would stream in from other forums. We'd get about 60 new threads per day, but we'd only move a few to the public boards where people could read and respond to them. All the unused posts would be deleted by pruning the entire private board from time to time, so we were not artificially boosting our posts post count.
Now that our forum has about 300-400 posts/day, we no longer use the Paperboy account, but it worked pretty well when we did use it. The trick was just to pick out the few posts that were good.
TVDinner wrote: I know of a few sites that have literally HUNDREDS of thousands of news feed posts and almost no other posts. for example http://www.bike-forums.com/ . Now I am not putting this site down, just using it as an example. I don't think a regular user can even post in the news feed generated threads. What in the world is the point to that? You can't even post in the threads and participate.
I guess I think it is an artificial way to make a site look busier then it is and if you never grow the actual rest of your forum you really don't have much of anything as far as a community goes. Just my thoughts.....
At IGI, we posted news items relative to the theme of the forum. For fun, we also had feeds that were exclusively strange news just for laughs. This works ok, if you only post a few items.
hatever:
