What do you want from a forum?

Lee, you have posed a good question as to what folks look for or want in a forum or site. I see no one has posted on this subject in quite a long time, so after reading through some of the responses to your question, I would like to throw in my two cents for what they are worth.

I can't speak for others, but when I go to a new website, I am looking for certain features which are:

Friendliness, helpfulness, a place to discuss the aspects of the Sims3 game that I am most interested in and a place to showcase the Sims3 lots and worlds that I love to build the most. For some, it is objects, clothes, hair, stories or even screen-shots.

These are the things that I feel most people are looking for. I noticed that you only had two CC items for Sims3. Sims3 is the most popular game right now, so it looks like you need to attract more Sims3 creators, yet I see no forums for Sims3 in those areas. You have a lot devoted to Sims2, which is great, but the Sims3 aspect seems to be lacking.

I may be asking for the moon here. But perhaps, you could separate your forum more into categories, instead of just one general forum for everyone. I have no interest in Sims2 now and would only head to the Sims3 forums and CC sections when arriving on your site as a new visitor. I hope this makes sense. And I have not confused or offended you in any way. I would love to showcase my worlds and lots here to get the ball rolling if that is feasible. I have no idea what your site can handle, so that will be your call. I hope my suggestions have been helpful and you have found some clarity to my crazy thoughts.

Just some food for thought.

Thanks for the input Judy, its EXACTLY what I was looking for

Lets take the points one at a time:

Yes, Sims3 is the popular game, and we do support it - I haven't separated the sims3 stuff from the sims2, but rather blobbed it all into Sims. Are we not all simmers?

I can add a couple of discussion forums - sims2 and sims3 as subforums as I see the need to keep those separated. For the finds you can already filter out sims2 or sims3 and the pictures gallery is not filtered as the pictures are pretty no matter what game (I think). Course, we could do with some sims3 pics to adjust the imbalance in that forum

Re cc items:

Judy Wrote:I noticed that you only had two CC items for Sims3. Sims3 is the most popular game right now, so it looks like you need to attract more Sims3 creators, yet I see no forums for Sims3 in those areas. You have a lot devoted to Sims2, which is great, but the Sims3 aspect seems to be lacking.

I guess you have to mean just me specifically? I mean CMO is ONLY sims3, as is dal, and they both have CC items here on leefish.

I think that this is actually the biggest "problem" - I made leefish to be a creators showcase really.

This means that the creators each have a forum of their own - like a mini-site. We have a generic area for members to upload, the mini sites are really for me, BO dal and CMO. If we had a creator who wanted to upload here and they were in an area of sims we don't already cover then they would get a mini-site of their own with their own custom theme designed by me (with creator input) which really feels like an own site. So yea, we have a space for a regular creator of TS3 lots and worlds right here on leefish . In addition we have a fairly comprehensive stats system for creators, so you can see how many downloads on a given day, a grand total of all downloads and a 90 day uploads history where you can select dates.

All awesome for creators. Rather less awesome for downloaders, as its a total bugger to find everything

So, the next step is to build a custom page which is the ultimate big page of everything. That will be for the downloaders. That is the final phase of the downloads system project. Then I think we will have an uploads/downloads system which will rival MTS for general useability. I hope.

Not offended AT ALL on the questions, and if you want to look at uploading to leefish then let me know via pm. Things to know would be file size, pictures requirements, that sort of thing. It would be nice if the stuff was exclusive, especially if you were thinking mini-site. Some links to the things you have made would be cool too

Ok Leefishy. I am going to other sites and ambassadoringitizing lol Ill be adding affiliates Soon .-.

Ok .. I have one Site down

I think there is many community using this forum ..
but if you still want to improve the number of user of this forum than you have to attract people to this forum to use this and send it to other friends

um thank you james. I know that, but I am a polite and shy person and asking all my friends to join leefish is not my style.

Please can I have a way of seeing the whole forum list in one screen? I have to keep clicking different buttons and opening different subsections and by the time I work out I have already been in that section there are probably sections I have left out that might have interested me. I'd really love a way to work my way down a forum list from top to bottom - at least then I would know how far down I had got

Your wish is my command Inge - use mybb default. OK - I will also install a quick theme changer AS WELL

Thank you

Good points there, James

* leefish woggles an eyebrow at Inge