MyBB Community Forums

I just wanted to stir up some opinions with this post.

We see many websites that start up and provide nothing but community value. They barely offer content or a service, yet their community drives their website and makes it interesting and compelling.

Other websites form a community as a consequence to their 'own existence'. They provide a service or content, and the gathering of people interested in that subject matter ends up forming a community. This is the case of MYBB.com

Is this latter situation preferable in your opinion? Are totally community driven projects less valuable than those websites which have as their foundation content and functionality? How far can a community effort go? When is one better than the other? How should community value be marketed, and is it monetizable? Let's discuss a few strategies.

NB: This is not an essay or homework. I posted this because I got curious and thought it was a intellectual and interesting discussion to start. Plus, it might be of valu to all of us that work with communities out there.

Very interesting topic, I've actually been wondering the same thing for the past few weeks. I'll be keeping an eye on this one.

And in my opinion I think the latter situation is preferred, it just makes the most sense. Create content and then get the discussion going.

I think it depends on what is needed. I prefer sites like mybb.com as they provide a direction and cause. Communities setup to be just a community usually end up with multiple directions and no real cause for existence.

I think the latter can form some very strong communities, but once the content is no longer relevant the community can fall apart (especially with bad management). iPodWizard.net comes to mind here (wonderful, strong community, but once Apple released the encrypted iPods iPW was useless and nobody had a reason to visit the site; add on staff that had little interest in the site and now it's basically down to me and zim to keep the site afloat). Community just to have community is more resilient, but only if the community can get started.

I personally think that if you can find something to base your site around that has little to no risk of becoming irrelevant, you have the potential to create a good community, especially if your site is relatively unique.