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In quite a few posts and even in my blogroll I mentioned and included a link to the 2+2 Money Making & Business Forum. I always found this particular forum to be valuable for reasons a bit different from other business forums I visited such as the Warrior Forum or the Small Business Forum. It was a smaller community in general, but visitors frequented enough for threads to receive a wide variety of responses. Furthermore, newcomers to the business game were able to have their beginner questions answered with more detail than I have found with some of the more popular forums.

Unfortunately, the 2+2 Money Making & Business Forum slowly declined over the past few months. Some of the meaningful discussion was squelched for reasons that may have made sense to those running the forum, but a negative result. Most of this started to occur after a knowledgeable, well-liked forum moderator was stripped of his moderator status, and two new moderators were assigned who tightened up the rules too much.

Forum members were no longer allowed to post links to the projects they were working on. Because a lot of the forum discussion revolved around getting starting in online business, and due to the number of beginners frequenting the forum with question, it was difficult to provide help at times without actually being able to visit the website.

The moderators argued with statements such as “questions about what order to put links on your sidebar or whether or not your CSS layout looks good are ultimately not that important.” I attempted to point out that these questions are in fact extremely important. Layout and element ordering within a page will determine whether your visitors will stay and make a purchase/join your RSS feed/join your newsletter/etc., or if they will not see the aforementioned things due to poor placement. Furthermore, SEO is a huge consideration in getting traffic, and seeing how things are linked, whether headers are used, and so forth are all important assets to a successful online business today.

Ultimately these issues resulted in the more experienced members leaving the community or simply visiting the forum without posting. The forum slowly declined, and it was eventually merged with another community, Finance & Investing, despite the two topics clearly deserving separate boards.

From this, I would recommend to those running a forum or similar website to listen to the voices of those who make up your community. Without satisfying their needs, they will have more reason to not remain a member of your community. And without them, your site will not be able to succeed.