How to use this forum?

Can anyone please share how to use this forum and what are the benefits of spending our precious time here.

You write something. Other people respond.

If you see benefits in that (whatever they might be), it’s worth participating. If not, well, it’s probably not.

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Actually i found it’s very unique concept. But how we can connect to our fellow designers to explore new things?

Benefits for me are the camaraderie, water cooler talk, helping others, learning new things, having a pool of folks to answer questions as they arise, and getting feedback on my work.

That said, this forum is like so many other things in life. You get out of it what you put into it.

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If you are looking to participate in a forum for marketing purposes, this probably isn’t the place to do that since most of the members here are professional designers.

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You’d have to get altruism, that comes back at you on unexpected ways. If you don’t, don’t bother.

Forums have been around for a long time, but they’ve gradually disappeared in favor of people posting short comments on various social media platforms.

Here, the conversations tend to be a little longer, stretch out over a period of days, and focus on various design-related subjects in response to someone asking a question or making a comment.

We have two or three dozen regular participants. Most are experienced designers who enjoy sharing information, engaging in debates, and responding to questions and comments from a constant stream of new forum members who are often inexperienced, students, or working alone and wanting to benefit from interacting with other designers.

Take me, for example, I’ve been in this business for over 40 years, so I don’t have a whole lot of questions. I do, however, have lots of opinions and some insight that I’ve picked up over those years. As @sprout suggested, much of this forum’s success has to do with people wanting to share what they know (or think they know :wink: ) with others.

And after the first ten posts or so on a topic, the conversation can tend to wander.
Did I say ten? Often two.

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Not to mention the fact that Just-B just mentioned, that you only be marketing to two to three dozen people. :joy:

This forum is something like a panel discussion on television: a few people talk, but many times more are listening.

Here’s a screen capture from the forum admin pages. The numbers aren’t huge, but they’re significant.

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Roughly 10k views a day?

Without detailed analytics this number is rather meaningless. How many views are from bots? What is the bounce rate? How many are repeat visits? How many are actually interested and consume the content? Etc.

The only meaning I meant to convey is that the readership is considerably higher than the two or three dozen regular contributors we have might suggest. A full site analytics report isn’t needed to demonstrate that.

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This forum is mostly used to avoid the next thing on the work list.
Guess I gotta go do it.

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And why shouldn’t it? For me, that’s surely a big part of the appeal of the old-fashioned “message board,” compared to the like-this-and-follow-me, hit-and-run style of the currently more popular forms of online interaction. Here, you can actually get to “know” a person; learn what they’ve been through and what they learned from it. Tangential conversation is often a fertile bed of discovery.

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Actually, page views are plainly listed for each topic and they don’t reflect 10k daily visits of real activity. This topic has had 42 views to date, for instance.

Are you looking at the views on the Latest Activity page?
That doesn’t account for views from people looking up info in any of the thousands of inactive threads. If they don’t post, the thread does not become Active.

tenor

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I’ll admit, I’m probably the most guilty party when it comes to taking a thread sideways off topic.
It’s just part of my random personality.
:slight_smile:

I may be random, but I’m predictable. Eventually everything points to liquors.

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Yes, but I just took a quick look sorted by category. It doesn’t reflect 10k views per day either. It is interesting though, to notice that the few topics which have significant views (over 1k) seem to be of technical in interest, like someone doing a google search for “how do I make a clipping mask in illustrator” and then clicking on a link to this forum with the matched indexed keywords.

The highest value contributions to the wider world, in other words, are merely technical.