Original Article by TechSling Weblog:

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If your Forum looks outdated, why no give it a bit of a facelift?

Revamp your forum’s design

59% of consumers across the globe would rather engage with beautifully designed content over simple content, even when they’re short on time.

Revamp your site by adding some new features or site sections.

There’s a reason why sites are constantly updated and changed. In 2014, Adobe Forums looked like this:

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Then, encourage new (and old) users to join your newly designed forums via email. Tell them what’s changed and give them a breakdown of how to navigate and use the new forum.

Convert forum topics to tickets

Your forum is a great place for your customers to find support. They can use it to help one another out, talk about your features, and discuss your brand.

But that doesn’t mean that you should never get involved. You can convert these topics into tickets with a

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That way, your team can get to work on an issue instead of waiting for another customer to provide help.

They can even monitor certain topics by clicking on the “follow” button so that they receive an email each time that a post is added to the thread.

Conclusion

There are tons of shiny, new ways to communicate with people across the web.

But that doesn’t mean that older kinds of online communities, like forums, are dead.

People use them for self-service support all of the time.

First things first: you need to organize your posts into different categories to make it easy for people to find solutions.

Then, rack down on spam comments. No one wants to sift through them while trying to read valuable content. Install an anti-spam plugin and police your website for spammers often.

Make it easy for users to report guideline violations, too, so that they take care of some of the work for you. It doesn’t hurt to revamp your forum’s design every once and a while. If you haven’t touched your forum’s layout since it launched, you need to.

Freshen things up a bit, add or update some images, and try changing the font for a more modern, sleek look.

Finally, never forget the importance of converting forum posts into tickets so that you can solve issues internally.

Don’t wait around for other customers to provide the help that you can offer yourself.

 What are you going to do to breathe life back into your online forum first?

The post Are Online Forums Dead? Here’s How to Resurrect Them first appeared on TechSling Weblog.