1 Answer

• Charles Borwick

  Part of the answer to this question is because of the Q&A structure which is described in the answer about moderation. Most "community" sites are forums added to a site. They rarely include the community because they do not feel like part of the site. Typically the contain a small subsection of the community that becomes somewhat tribal and is not inviting to new members. The fact that the content is loosely structured in topics and can include threads that go on forever winding on and off topic does not help. In truth, most active community forums tend to contain a lot of questions and answers. Many of these forums contain great content (unfortunately intermingled with a lot of commentary) and in fact are one of the most important sources of content, especially answers, on the web. I often refer to forums as the "dark matter" of the Internet because they probably represent the greatest quantity of content and, as I said, are a great resource for answers. In fact Google recently recognized this by adding forums to their search options. BUT as great as they are, they are not that easy to discover or navigate to the content you actually want which is why I refer to them as "Dark Matter".   Charles Borwick answered in Product 11 months ago | Report 0 0 Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question preview THIS IS A PREVIEW: Click "Post" to submit it or "Edit" to make changes. edit Please wait… This could take a minute if the tubes are clogged.