Retention Side-entertainment Value for a forum

[CTS]

I have often wondered this and never really came to a conclusion in my past experiences.

All forums have some type of entertainment value. From lounge and chat forums for members, active thread games and events, to outright extremely elaborate designed games or events. And quite honestly I like participating in some of them in forums I am at.

The big question is, what seems to work the best. But really I just want to know do they prove worthwhile? Do certain things work poorly to the community? Outside of the obvious above, has anyone tried anything unique?

I don't want to game-ify my website, but I am looking at it and thinking I see opportunity for something. Just haven't clicked on it yet.

 

[Cedric]

There isn’t a one size answer fits all, or however it’s spelled correctly. What works for one community doesn’t necessarily work for the other.

I always liked doing events and giveaways, and do it very often on Administrata. But some things get more engagement compared to others. It’s something you need to try out and not immediately give up if one thing doesn’t work. What works now, doesn’t mean it will work later.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I think it also depends on the niche of the forum. For example, say you have a gaming related forum. You could have contests or tournaments even where members can earn gift cards or even possibly steam codes to certain games. It's best to test the waters with a few different things to see what sticks.

 

[KatBookTrailers]

There was one year I did Bingo games with my members. It was fun at the beginning and we had some activity from it, but then after a few rounds, it died down. I tried other events, but those members wanted good conversation, not fun and games. We had a chat box, that didn't go anywhere. We even online games to play, but one player dominated all the high scores and whined when others wanted a reset. SO we just got rid of those all together. Problem solved.

 

[fdk]

The biggest (any only that I've ever had real success with) forum that I owned was truly "kicked off" by an idea to build a working sportsbook betting function into the forum currency system to allow for betting on football matches. As we were a football forum, this seemed like a cool idea at the time, and I thought it'd spark discussions and extra activity in order to earn the currency to accumulate, as well as the discussing of bets meaning the more discussion of football in general. I couldn't see any downsides.

In fact, there were no downsides. The forum quickly grew to become a small-time competitor to some of the biggest football forums on the internet at the time, and generated a decently sized revenue for a website of it's size.

Finding a niche and being a groundbreaker or having an awesomely fun interactive feature that you're the first to do in a certain way can go a massive way to causing a population explosion in your community.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Experiment, experiment, and experiment.

Eventually, you'll find what works and what doesn't. I've been doing that with all my forums. Sometimes, my creativity isn't where I want it, and I'll load up a highly detailed question and feed it into my GPT to help give me inspiration.

It's just important that you try new things. Get away from your safety bubble. Experiments often lead to one-of-a-kind opportunities.