Nathan Waters

Who would have thought that online community forums could be so cut-throat!

As you may know, I’m a common lurker and poster (username: nado) at 4 young entrepreneur forums (sorted here in alphabetical order):

• EntrepreneursTalk.com (run by Scott)
• NetpreneurForums.com (run by Khalid)
• YoungEntrepreneur.com (run by Adam & Matthew)
• YoungGoGetter.com (run by Eric & Travis)

But those four are by no means the only young entrepreneur focused forums on the Net. I’ve been seeing a new forum popup every single week and some other great ones that I just haven’t yet got into (either because they are new, have little post activity or just aren’t for me) include the Blogtrepreneur Forums (run by Adnan), YoungEntrepreneur.com.au (run by Chris), EntrepreneurLounge.com (run by Jamie), NetBusinessTalk.com (run by Spencer Fry), YoungCeoForum.com (run by Maurice), GoBigNetwork.com (run by Wil) and many more.

Some offer something a little different than others, some have more traffic than others, some have better moderation than others, some have better content than others and some have better members than others. But of course any community forum requires a community to grow, so there tends to be some competition to grab new members and retain them…

OK, I’m going to try and keep this as unbiased as possible and let you decide

I’m a mega forum-addict and so I tend to spend more time on the forum with the most post-activity, which also generally means it has more members. Currently that forum is and has been YE.com which I’ve been registered with since mid-2005 and have over 900 posts.

However YE.com has been plagued with a couple of problems such as SPAM, lack of moderation, lack of features and a diminishing sense of community where the admins/mods seem to only show up to ’solve’ an escalating forum issue. In recent months the problems have been slowly getting better, until about a week ago when this thread went live: Adsense websites for sale. Have a read through it, as it’s a long story.

Basically a guy from New Zealand (username: F360) who I chat to every now and then via instant messaging was selling a few websites he had as he had been banned from Google Adsense (which was later found to be a mistake on Google’s behalf).

Within days after this thread… F360 (501 posts), fattony (389 posts) and iGROWyourBiz (134 posts) were all banned with apparently no publicly-released reasons.

Exactly… WTF?

Daniel (aka akula) posted this thread: fattony - unban him, which is also worth a read (esp akula’s reply).

The vibe I get from Adam (one of YE.com’s admin) is that those 3 members were promoting other competing forums for young entrepreneurs and so were banned and shut-out. But you can make up your own mind from the threads

The point of this blog post is that a community forum only exists if there is a community. I believe that stereotypical fierce business competition cannot and should not be applied to online community forums. Admins need to be focused on enhancing a sense of community through involvement and member wants/needs rather than focusing on competing with other forums for members.

What I’m after in a young entrepreneur forum are (in order of importance):

1) a sense of community
2) helpful responses
3) intelligent members
4) admins that respond to the community’s desires

btw, I’ve been spending a lot of time on YGG after that incident. I have absolutely no influences in any direction, but having got back into the YGG forums I am yet to see a single thread which Eric or Travis (the admins) haven’t been involved in, I am yet to see a single piece of SPAM, and I’m loving the additional features.

Nathan Waters
Always Looking For a Forum High