Make the Forum Subscription Only?

I probably shouldn't have "liked" that. But the devil in me made me do it.

What do you consider to be rubbish?

Some key things to a healthy forum are:

1. Very free discussion of the core subject matter, a failure here is the one that I think is most likely.

2. Banter and jokes. But not always everywhere throughout the business discussions because they raise the noise level while also being good for community building. A challenge here is that there are many boards and each would need its own fun area to do the community building job well, as well as also an overall one.

3. A lack of personal attacks, as distinct from frank criticism, comment and discussion about things and arguments rather than people.

4. A sufficient staff pool to do the required work, with 2 being a particular challenge because it's not something that is normally reportable but does take significant work to handle, ideally more than all other admin work combined. Yet the community building is important and it has to be accepted that people always joke around while building relationships. This also requires moderators with more than just passing familiarity with the platforms in the areas where they are moderating because actual knowledge of how a platform works is sometimes required.

5. Self-restraint by moderators. Nothing is often the best response and failing that, even a small token reaction is likely to be sufficient most of the time.

In the past I've moderated the off topic section of a board for some of the best sysops around, the former crowd at CompuServe in their private forum. As well as running one of their forums myself.

There's room for improvement in 2 here, one start might be a dedicated joking around topic for each platform board that can take the business discussion joking around if it lasts more than a few posts.

1 and 4 might be helped by using dedicated moderation accounts for each moderator to more clearly delineate "official" speech as distinct from personal speech. It's not strictly necessary but some moderators here are particularly concerned about liability issues and per-person role accounts can help with this, providing a way for a moderator to speak personally without an official label on that speech, without concealing the identity of the moderator concerned.

unless of course you are interested in derivatives, pie charts, critical analysis and calculativ.....Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Try these then.