Off and Running

[Neil]

Ok, the forums are up, now we just need some good old fashioned posting. I'll start. I set these forums up because it's always nice to have somewhere to talk about your team and some of us can't get into chat rooms at certain times or just plain hate them. Also, it's a lot easier to read a mesage board than it is to filter through two hours of garbage trying to find useful info.

I will be making a few minor changes here and there. If you see something that you think should be here and isn't, let me know in the suggestions area, I tried to cover all bases but I may have missed something.

Anyway, Welcome to the forums and Enjoy.

[montgjules]

Someone set up a special Blitzz forum, separate from the official USL forums. People all looked at it cautiously and said, "I'm not going to post here until everyone else posts here. Prove that this is worth it." Being a good-natured soul, I tried to make a success of both forums by posting on both. However, I'll have to admit, it didn't take. If you want this one to a success, you'll have to personally post often until you build up a reliable member list.

Still being a good-natured soul, I'll hope for the success of this forum. We'll see if people have the same "wait and see" attitude that they did toward the Blitzz forum. I found that different types of information were posted in the two forums, so it was an interesting way of comparing ideas.

However, if you want this to be a Real Salt Lake forum, you should limit it to that. Let people discuss the national team, other MLS teams, etc. somewhere else. I've seen several new forums set up where they tried to make it a "discuss everything" forum and the threads that weren't directly related to the team on hand were never posted in. Just a thought! Discussing other MLS teams would be a good idea under the guise of "The Competition" though.

Also, you may find the forum is a bit slow until something actually HAPPENS. On BigSoccer, the forums are always active because there are a lot of people from other cities and teams that come in curiously and want to throw in their two-cents-worth. You won't get that "good natured" chatter here probably. So if the forum is a success, it'll probably be so mostly after there's something to discuss: after player allocation, actual games, etc.

I hope that doesn't sound negative. My intent is to throw out some ideas about how to make this a successful forum. Cheers! 🙂

[Neil]

Doesn't sound negative at all. Actually, that's exactly the kind of feedback that I'm looking for. I want to make this thing a success just as much as I hope that our franchise is a success. So are you saying I should kill the "World Scene" and "US National Team" Forums to make things a little more centered?

[Jim Umber]

Like Juliana, I think the other listings are simply confusing the issue. On the other hand, I'm usually more of a lurker than a poster. But I'll tell you right now that what I'm looking for while lurking is ReAl Salt Lake. I agree with the competition idea that Juliana had. One thread for all the second rate (not ReAl Salt Lake) teams out there.

[Neil]

US National and World Scene Forums are gone. Focus, Focus, Focus.

[montgjules]

Excellent work. I can see you're dedicated to customer satisfaction! 😉

My only other concern/complaint/comment is about the organization of the forum. I have this concern w/ a lot of forums. I'd rather have all the different topics just grouped together in one big page, instead of clicking inside a subforum and then to a topic. It makes it much harder to look around and see everything. Is there a way to list all the topics together or something like that? Just curious! Maybe the organization will come in handy later when there are more posts.

[Neil]

Hehe. I try.

As far as the condensed forum. i think this layout seems a little much for right now since all we have to talk about is who we think are going to be players and how much we can't wait to start, but when the season starts hopefully traffic will pick up and we'll have a bunch of regulars.

My advice is to just click on "New Posts" when you load the forum pages since it loads all threads that have had posts since you last visited onto one handy page, it's what I do anyway.

[fuegote]

I like the "new posts" link, makes things easy.