forum.ittavern.com is online and I would love to welcome you there!

More information about the forum itself can be found in the original forum post. In this article I would like to share my thoughts and ideas with you.

Motivation & Goals

I don't really have any goals, but I would like to create a community with like-minded people. I miss the old school forums and bulletin boards and this is my attempt to create an open minded and sustainable space for discussion and knowledge sharing.

The reasons I like the format of the forum are simple: long and asynchronous discussions, priority to on-topic discussions, easily searchable, and some minor things. I am not a big fan of social media and chat platforms like Discord because they are so fickle and focus on different goals.

There are plenty of reasons why I think the forum is a great idea: using the forum as a comment section for the articles, having a support platform for the services I host, learning & growing together, sharing more short form content, having community projects, and the usual and previously mentioned forum activities.

I'll try to keep my expectations low. Communities take time to grow and I'll do my best to add value and content to the forum. For this reason, I plan to keep this forum online for at least 3 years to give it time to grow and evolve over time.

Risks & Doubts

The admin of an old forum once told me "being an admin of a forum is like being a host at a party: it's great as long as you're not the host", and that has stuck with me ever since. There are plenty of reasons for this, such as fighting spam, keeping everything up and secure, moderating, making tough decisions (e.g. feature-set or heated discussions), and the overall time commitment.

**Building an active community will be the hardest part. Providing enough value to keep people engaged and active with a dying format and without a pre-existing community on another platform.

Personally, I think the chances are slim, but I believe in this project and sometimes you have to give it a chance.

The Future

I have enough ideas for the forum and I'm looking forward to working on it. The plan is to keep it simple for now and only add features when needed to keep it simple. However, the first thing I'm going to tackle is MFA for user accounts.

Another plan is to create a better synergy with my other projects. An example would be to show forum posts on articles as comments. The idea is there, but I am not sure how to implement it yet.

Something I am going to start next month is Weekly/Monthly Community Projects. I have to work on it, so I can't give too much information at the moment.

Conclusion

Ideas, motivation, and plans are there and time will tell if it works out.

I hope to give you some insight by sharing my thoughts and would be happy to welcome you to forum.ittavern.com. Your feedback and questions are more than welcome.

Thank you for reading, enjoy your stay and have a good day.

Visit the Forum for Questions, Feedback & Comments

E-Mail hellofoo@ittafoovern.comcom
Fediverse ITTavern
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