There were times, when we had multiple times as many posts every day compared to nowadays. But while we all know, that those days will likely never come back, I still believe that we could achieve a little more activity here. Often, when I get in touch with new (to me) unicyclists, they don’t even know about the forum. Most are active on more modern social media platforms and don’t find their way over here.
That’s, why I want to collect ideas on how to motivate others to participate here. But I also want to encourage you all to try helping to grow our community.
What I have in mind is the following:
On other social media platforms, you have the always same questions asked and answered over and over again, just because it is nearly impossible to research information there. If you are active on Facebook or other platforms, you might know what I mean. “Which crank length is best for Muni?” … “Will this tire fit this frame?” … “Which saddle shall I choose?” … you name it.
Why not always answer those questions when you get aware of them. Research the requested information with our fantastic search tool. Link the corresponding post / thread over there and tell them how you found it and that they can find and easily research loads of information over here. Tell them that most questions are already answered in detail here. Tell, what a nice community we have here. Motivate them to research here, to ask here, to contribute here.
Part of it is probably that dedicated forums such as this one were sort of superseded by having certain groups within a particular social media platform. Like joining a Facebook unicycle group or something along those lines. Of course, however, there are downsides when going through the larger social media platforms that tilt me towards using this forum instead. Are forums underrated nowadays? Maybe.
Usually when I meet someone that’s semi-serious about learning to unicycle, I point them here. It’s a much cleaner, less cluttered repository of info than most places.
I reckon the peeps that know this forum, don’t venture on facebook. I certainly don’t when all answers are here with my unicycle buddies.
But there should be some advertisement of the forum, like drop in a post about the existence of this great library of unicycle information. That way more peeps might drop by.
Maybe @Canapin can make like a welcome page with pictures of unicycles/unicyclists/unicycling and parts and draws attention and pulls new people in.
People are used to social media, and I think they don’t have the opportunity (or simply don’t want) to change their habits, even if forums are still the best regarding the quality of content, for many, many reasons.
I think the only way that can have an impact (besides social media crumbling down for good) is to communicate about it, share it. You can create invite links from this page: https://unicyclist.com/new-invite
That’s true that Discourse’s default design is kinda bland. I changed the color but didn’t do anything else.
The issue is that there not much free space to add decorations, but I could add a banner with some image, texts and links for visitors and new users.
There are two official components for this:
That won’t help the forum to be discovered, but it might make the forum more eye-catching.
What about like… 3 neat pictures of 3 different unicycling disciplines, along with bit of text?
I was reading the other day that forums are coming back. People are starting to get sick of FB and other social networks because you’re exposed to so much crap even if you just join for one thing. Also the AI algorhythms are becoming more and more intrusive. So it may take a while to become mainstream, but there is a move to places that only cater to one hobby and are free from ads and crap.
How about improving the apparent post quality when opening this forum by partially hiding the “crap” threads which can be identified usually by the “off-topic” flag? You know the threads: “ban the previous poster”, “last to post wins” and such like. Maybe have a link in the side panel to all this off-topic stuff instead of having it clogging the main list of topics?
I would have to agree with that. Those are just games on the forum and since they have a label, the search should automatically be able to include this filter. What do you think @Canapin
EDIT: oh you mean from the entry page under topics, not necessarily through the Search function.
What about having an Off-topic group at the top like so:
Personally I just go to the post and deactivate notifications whenever …someone floods the main page with these games. Then they disappear for me. But for a new user they won’t. Sometimes there are some nice off-topic threads coming up, so this would be a loss, but as the situation is right now with a constant flood of spam-topics, I would actually welcome the off-topics be hidden from the main view. But I can live with it.
Nowadays every company has their own apps. My phone is flooded with them. I like that the forum is just available from a browser. Then I won’t get any notifications either, which I also turn off as much as possible from other apps.
I came across several people lately who refrain from installing any more apps on their phone. With one colleague I communicate through SMS because he doesn’t want to install any other messenger than whatsapp. I’m not sure whether a quality app for the forum will change this.
Personally I quite like the experience in the browser - I’m old and I’m definitely not the average user.
I agree. I initially (years ago) hid the Off-topic from being public, so it was hidden for visitors.
I felt there was close to nothing of value in this category for visitors, but at the time there was also very, very few Off-topic topics active.
Now the front page is a bit cluttered with them so I can hide the whole category from being shown again in search engine results and unregistered users.
As for registered users, I think the best is let them know that they can taylor what they want to see and what they don’t want to see to fit their need.
They can mute (hide) a topic by clicking the bell:
edit: I answered without reading the previous replies. So yes, we can do that (hide the category for visitors). Can I let you do it @Eric_aus_Chemnitz ?
I am so glad that it is not ‘just me’…. when this spawned to be more resurrected junk threads recently I did briefly look to see if there was a way to hide specific threads completely.
To play devil’s advocate though, perhaps this is the sort of thing that might help attract new users, not that I am advocating the place turning into a spam playground, but it is perhaps the sort of stuff which appeals to a younger user who ‘lives’ in the social-media centric world.
I agree that there are useful off-topic threads so my suggestion would be to make a new “games” (or similar) category, recategorise appropriate threads to that category and don’t show this new category on the front page list of new posts. The ‘games’ category would still be accessible to non-users on the sidebar list of categories so casual people just browsing would see that that sort of thing is available if it appeals to them. Regular “off-topic” posts would still appear on the main list of new threads.
I’m not sure we can make a whole category available for visitors, but hide it at the same time from the home page.
The closest is to make the category muted by default for all users (it would be still available from the category page, just hidden from the home page), but that would override their personal preference, and more importantly this is a user setting so it can’t be applied for visitors.
To get back to forum activity, I feel that this forum is not even close from dying. It’s healthy, but one could argue it lacks newcomers. It has been mostly the same core group for many years.
The French forum was very close from dying when I migrated it to Discourse, and I’m pretty sure this change “saved” it, and I see it being active for many more years, even if it’s also a small core group, with very few new users.
After 2000-2020s, unicycling went way less popular than before (there was a time were many teenagers practiced), and I think it’s a natural thing. Trends come and go. But I think it was also at the same time the social network appeared, and Facebook groups took over most communities even if they’re crap.
Nowadays, people seem to migrate to Whatsapp or Telegram.
The French community was less active on the forum, more on Facebook, and now they organize events via Telegram, if I’m not mistaken. @Maxence might know more than me. But I think it’s a global phenomenon and we can assume it’s the same for many communities including unicyclist.com?
I’m sorry to say it but, forums are just old hat these days.
I’ve recently just started looking in again because in the UK we’re trying to figure out how to widen the reach of our British Muni Weekend events. I remembered that there might be a swathe of people here who don’t use social media and so might be missing events.
That and the amount of spam threads on the homepage. I was hoping threads like Most Replies would be a thing of the past but was disappointed when I saw loads of similar threads clogging up the homepage. I’m here to talk about unicycling, not crap. There is plenty of that on social media
