Hi,
After a year of hosting a bulletin board I have come to the conclusion that most of the people visiting my site are viewing and not participating
. The forum setup is prohibitive and most people have moved on despite craving the content.
I am now looking at alternatives like WordPress and was wondering if there is any way of extracting the 50 or so core posts (and the few replies) into WordPress automatically.
Any help would be appreciated.
Simon
Well first off bye bye.
A few intregrations have been made, nothing stable, WordBB is one. I would suggest moving to another system then to wordpress.
Trust me blogs barely get any comments, people leech more of blogs than forums
.
What other system would be a suitable bridge?
I'm not sure. You may end up having to either manually copy everything or hire a coder to code a bridge. If you want to pay, i can get you in touch with him.
I agree with you Zomaian. The problem is that it is not what I think it is what the readers are willing to do. Most visit two or three times, ferret through the forums, read a few posts then leave. They don't register to the forums they are interested in and don't come back. Don't get me wrong, I like MyBB, its just that provision of content requires consideration of the end user.
Sorry you have made this decision and I truly feel this is an error on your part, Simon. Zomaian is correct in his statement. It is not the software that is the situation and after trying many of them this is the only software that enables pretty much flawless migration. I do believe you will have to manually copy your current forum to whatever alternative you choose.
(2009-12-02, 05:06 AM)Mark.M Wrote: [ -> ]I'm not sure. You may end up having to either manually copy everything or hire a coder to code a bridge. If you want to pay, i can get you in touch with him.
Mark.M,
I am looking for something quick. I could manually cut-and-paste but I want to avoid this if a utility already exists.
Simon
(2009-12-02, 05:13 AM)Starnova Wrote: [ -> ]Sorry you have made this decision and I truly feel this is an error on your part, Simon. Zomaian is correct in his statement. It is not the software that is the situation and after trying many of them this is the only software that enables pretty much flawless migration. I do believe you will have to manually copy your current forum to whatever alternative you choose.
Sarnova,
As I said to Zomaian, this is a decision I have not taken lightly. What would you have me do? I have hosted my forum for over a year and regularly posted. 90% of the users visit but get confused on how to move around, register to forums and contribute.
What is the use of publishing content for others if the target audience can't find it or get notified when the content is posted. The MyBB forum I had running was essentially acting as a blog but with the added complexity that my visitors were not willing to acquaint themselves with.
The other statistics that are relevant was that 90% of the traffic to the forum was from bots, yet <1% of the visits to the forum originated from google and other search facilities. 99.9% of referrals came from emails by me to everyone and sundry about a post that I started. Once posted several hundred people would visit that page, read for several minutes, then disappear.
My expectation of a forum is that it would create a lively community of people willing and keen to share information, ideas and help one another (like this one where in minutes of posting a thread I have had numerous replies) - this is not what has happened. Nothing is wrong with MyBB it is just that the the broader community in which I find myself are technophiles. Most think email is to hard and facsimiles still rate as hightech equipment.
Any ideas how I can engage such a community I am willing to listen, but I have tried everything I could think of to address this issue. The simple fact is that the users just want easily digested content; they don't really want to get involved.
Simon
I believe you are correct. Simon is anything exists, it most likely only will exist for PhpBB or SMF.
Sorry.
If you didn't get any people to register/read than you didn't had any interesting content.
Look you said your forum acted like a blog? Why use MyBB
. If that the case just use WordPress like you intended to do.