We aren't getting too much use of the community bulletin board I have setup using the WEC discussion forum - I think this may because people aren't subscribing to it so when people do post - no one looks at the messages.....

I was thinking about automatically subscribing all of my front-end users - but don't know if there is an easy way to do this. I see in the SQL database the individual user subscriptions to a wec forum appears to be in the tx_wecdiscussion_group table - would I have to upload all of the users to this table?

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Bob.

Hi Bob,

You could set up a SQL query to create those records based on frontend users. However, I would caution you on this because if the forum gets active, they will receive emails for every post. So they may get 5-10 emails a day. Of course they can unsubscribe easily.

One thing you might want to consider is to add a "Preview" of the discussion. We have done this on some sites and this helps really well to promote what is being said at the more visible level. Then they can click on the Preview and go to the Discussion forum.

Another suggestion to improve usage is to seed the forum with discussion questions or thoughts. Or encourage people to share life events or life stories on it that would be helpful to others.

The thing about forums is that if you can get it going, it will likely sustain itself. If users think there might be something interesting on there, they will learn to go there and check. The more they see something there, the more they will go there and even consider posting their own comments. But it does take some work and dedication to get it going.

-Dave