Do you read all the posts made in your forums? I try my best to do so. For the first 4 months, I didn’t miss a single post. However, as the forums grow more active, keeping up with every post becomes challenging. That said, I’d estimate I’ve read about 90% of the posts on Administrata—just not all of them.

 

When I’m away and return to find I’ve missed a batch of posts, I still make an effort to catch up. If it’s been more than 24 hours, I’ll often go through each section individually to read what I missed. I believe it’s important to read as many posts as possible because there might be discussions that directly concern your forum or even yourself. Plus, there’s always the chance of rule-breaking posts that need to be addressed.

 

So, do you read all of your forum’s posts? How important is it to do so? Is it worth spending two hours catching up on missed posts, or should that time be invested in developing the forum instead?

I try to. Sometimes, it takes me a little bit. I'm a lot busier these days than I was long ago.

I read most the posts, not all. I mostly focus on the ones in my main sections.

I do try to read every post on my communities, I'm also subscribed to almost every topic I've replied to so I get notifications whenever someone replies to one of those threads.

I generally read all the posts on my community as I have most of them set to watch, so I receive notifications when there’s a new response.

Yes i do and so do the rest of the staff. We prioritize engaging with our friends/members on ours.

I only read the niche-related posts, so no.

My current forum is yet to be open to the public but in the past on my previous forum I wouldI try to read as much as I can, but once a forum started growing, keeping up with every post became almost impossible. In the beginning, I was super diligent about reading everything, but over time, I had to prioritize. Then, would focus on key areas—staff discussions, member concerns, and any high-engagement threads—while skimming the rest when I had time.

 

I do think it’s important to stay on top of things, especially to catch rule-breaking posts or to understand what the community is talking about. But at some point, spending hours reading every single post might not be the best use of time. If I fall behind, I’ll check the most active discussions first rather than trying to catch up on everything.

 

That said, I admire anyone who manages to keep up with 90% of their forum’s posts—that’s some serious dedication especially when you have a very active forum.

Whenever I've started a forum, I've always tried to read everything and engage with as much content as possible for as long as possible generally.

 

With my biggest forum, at a certain point, that become impossible as there were on some occasions tens of thousands of posts being made each month - at that stage, reading everything obviously becomes simply unfeasible. :ROFLMAO: At this point I tended on setting myself smaller goals - read all posts in the staff discussion forums and suggestions & feedback subforums, and try to ensure I kept up regular appearances in the main sections too even if I couldn't read everything.

A community leader must be active and updated on the happenings in the forum. That is why I also make my best attempt to read as many posts as possible, but it does become a little more cumbersome as the community gets larger.

I try to, I may not always reply but I make sure to glance at them if nothing else.

My first forum, I didn't read every post. There were some role playing games that I just wasn't interested in reading.

 

However, reviving all those ancient posts, as an Administrator, I should have at least kept an eye on those games, because some of the things occurring in the games were...not necessarily against the site TOS, but, shall we say frowned upon.

 

On my latest forum, I do read every post... of course, that's super easy right now, because I'm the only person on my forum posting. 😅