Invite only forums?

[Thomasss]

I've been considering starting a "invite only forum" that would well, be invite only. No spammers, no "inexperienced" members that are on some forums that are simply there to post and not contribute anything. It'd mainly be a webmaster/general forum set for those who show they're able to contribute to the forum, etc. It's basically a VIP forum. :tearsofjoy: Barley any "rules" per say, it wouldn't have as many restrictions as most forums would have.

Anyway, now that my idea is out there for the whole world to take, what are your thoughts on this concept of "invite only forums"? You have to know someone in order to get in, making the whole forum rather exclusive to only a set amount of people.

 

[JewishPoptart89]

I think it's a good idea!

 

[Namoh]

It's a great idea, it will take longer to populate the forums in the beginning but after awhile it should take off and people would want invites. I guess it also depends on what the topic is.

 

[Joe]

I suppose if you have a group of friends that you want to chat with privately, you could do that, or use skype.

How would you send these invites out? I'd imagine if you are PM'ing people you like on other forums, you'd get in trouble for PM advertising.

I've been on a couple private forums and they almost always become ghost towns after a while. I've seen a couple open up to the public out of desperation and they still ended up dying anyway.

 

[ddoesmc]

I think that an invite-only forum would be great! I've tried to do this in the past, let me tell you what happen.

I PM'ed about 100 contacts of mine on Skype that were involved with the forum's niche. Most of them responded with interest, the forum launched and only about 25 really joined. We got up to 500 posts or so, but after a short time, the forum died off because there was no one else to come and post fresh content besides the staff members and the two regular members. If I did it again, I'd post advertisements with a link to a form. The responses from that would be the queue to join the forum.

 

[Sylar]

As mentioned here, you run the substantial risk of losing activity. I think that to have an invite-only forum, some of the forum has to be public. This would allow you to have some activity already, and get people interested in the rest of the forum. Once they're interested and want to continue their discussions in the "meat" of the forum(aka the niche forums that are hidden), then you invite them in. Otherwise I think you would eventually just run out of things to talk about with your small group of friends.

The simple fact is, new members constantly rotating in and out allow for randomness and spontaneity in discussion, where one group of people tend to become stagnant after a while.

 

[Ash]

Invite forums tend to be quite good and successful if the admin is doing a good job. I would definately be interested if you started one, just make sure to send me an invite

 

[randiv]

Ok, That will be new things.

 

[Teg1]

Invite only can be a "Tedious" thing, especially if you have goals of having a very large member and content base. I've used invite only for forums in the past. That said, those forums were set to invite only for the purpose of development and testing of features. And, we only invited people who were familiar with the forum software and or the features we needed to test. Honestly, I feel like that is the only reason to have an invite only forum--for testing purposes. Once testing is pretty much complete, we'd open registration to all who want to join.