Startups Stack Exchange Archive

Should I use a forum?

I have a startup and I’m wondering if I should add a forum to my website so clients can discuss topics with each other. This would probably result in:

Is this a good idea and are there any reasons not to?

P.S.: This is for a hosting company.

Answer 706

I’m not sure we can really comfortably give you a 100% answer to this without knowing, well, everything about your existing situation. Forums are great, if you can say ‘yes’ to both of these questions:

  1. Do you have a lot of support tickets coming in? That’s important both to keep fiscally responsible (a forum isn’t free to maintain and if you can reply to an email a week and handle them all, that’ll be cheaper) and to ensure that there will be an audience and community able to keep the forum afloat.
  2. Could the types of support tickets you’re getting be answered by members of the community?

If both of those are affirmative to the point that you’d be saving money, that’s great and you should go for it. It’s probably also worth doing if you’re steadily increasing the counts, and will soon be to that point.

You say this is for a hosting company, which is a little ambiguous. If we’re talking about a “we’ll take care physically of your server” company, then I’m not sure I can see there as being sufficient need for a forum. In that case, most questions would either be hardware-related, in which case they should be coming to you directly, or generically available software-related, in which case Server Fault is probably a better place for people to find answers.

On the other hand, if you’re providing a proprietary software service on your own hardware (say, for instance, you’re running a cloud storage site), and you get a lot of questions asking things like “how do I add another user to my account so they can upload files?” that seems like the kind of question that would be good for a forum.

Long story short, you just have to look at the data. Look back through your records and see what kinds of numbers you’re getting, and what the nature is of your incoming tickets.

Remember also that a forum generally isn’t substitute for live people responding to individual cases. Nobody is going to want to wait on your forum to respond to a sev-A server-down call. Having a forum at best means that you can reduce the number of support staff, which is great, but keep that in mind.

And if you do start a forum, make sure people are aware of liabilities. If they listen to some random member of the community and wind up destroying their database, you don’t want to be at fault for that. That can be dealt with, of course, but make sure people are aware of who they’re talking to, and that those people don’t represent your company.

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