Forum Suggestions

[saracuse]

Congratulations on reaching 200 members! It's still very sad that Sony or the band pulled the plug on the official forum which had more than 8000 registered users... what a tragic loss of fan community! KasabianLive.com just doesn't measure up!

I would like to see this forum expand and I think a re-design is in order. Since the original Kasabian forum was so popular, I think it would be best to mirror that design as much as possible. Something about the current design isn't connecting with people as much as it should. It's still a great forum, but could be better

I think the sub-boards are a deterrent to navigating the forum and seeing what's been posted. You have to click on many links to see every posting from the last month, and some of the sub-boards have never been used. Simple is best, and the most popular forums direct traffic to fewer sections.

Here's roughly where the official forum was before it was shut down: 7 forums total, no sub-boards, about 20 topics appearing per page and plenty of posting...

I'd suggest combining everything into 4 sections with no sub-boards except for Bootleg Smiles which would be the only sub-board under Music:

Welcome - for introductions and questions about the forum

Music - combining news, music, albums and band members

Live - everything to do with concerts

Everything Else - everything that has nothing to do with Kasabian


Other than that, I think a visual redesign would help liven things up, maybe a wide graphic banner at the top and a different colour scheme. You could have a banner contest, and make it so that you have to have at least 10 posts to get access to the Bootleg Smiles forum.

I hope I'm not being too critical of this forum, it's a great starting point but I'd love to see it rival the now-defunct official forum.

[Admin]

Hi saracuse. I pretty much agree with most of what you said, a revamp is in order. I'm struggling to find time to get these things done at the moment but hopefully in the next week or so I should have improved the place slightly.

I'll also have to figure out how to do some of these things, or if some things are even possible on proboards!!

Thanks for the input ;D

[Admin]

Some adjustments made. A bit more to come in the next week or so. Let me know if there's any errors in what I've done so far, there was a lot of thread movement.

[helsbels72]

Hi Admin

Thanks for all your time and effort that you spend on the board. I hope that I speak for a lot of us, including the silent lurkers.

I too think that it is a great resource, but would dearly love to see some more 'action' here!

I think that we should all have a think how the board can be promoted; are there other 'non' Kasabian boards that we post to where we could add a link? Can we link from our blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr?

I don't have much time in the evenings and I can't access the board from work, but if there is anything I can do to help, then please contact me.

Helen

[saracuse]

Nice job on the forum! I really like the background photo, and the new forum groupings should make things a lot easier to find and hopefully encourage more posting.

I don't think there's much point in having an International forum though, I've seen it on other boards and it will rarely (maybe never) be used... to keep the forum looking active I think you should remove it unless someone specifically asks for one. There's a European forum (French maybe?) that's quite active and you'll also find international visitors who use Google translate to read and translate their replies into understandable English.

As for promoting the forum, the biggest problem was that Velociraptor was released after the official forum was obliterated, so any surge of new fans would have dissipated by now, unfortunately. The existing fanbase seems to have split in several directions or given up entirely. Velociraptor is a fairly divisive album so I can see some of the old guard not bothering to keep up with the band.

That said, here are the main boards I've found which could be approached to convert people over here:

Live4ever Kasabian thread
Live4ever Kasabian Audio/Video thread
Muse Messageboard Kasabian thread
Kasabian Music
Kasabian Empire
The Asylum

[saracuse]

Another suggestion is that the logo at the top is pretty outdated and should represent the current band imagery.

I've put together some banner ideas that you can feel free to use... please let me know if you'd like to use one of them but need it in a different size:

[cassabian]

Love the banners, saracuse!! Nice work!

Also I'm more than happy to promote the forum on my tumblr

[helsbels72]

Great banners - really striking!

Will also promote on my Tumblr.

Has Twitter been set up for the board for auto-updates? Is it possible on pro-boards?

Some great suggestions from all.

As part of the old 'Movement' from 2004 I do feel really miffed that the 'old' board was taken down and I feel strongly that we need to keep this board going.

There are lots of guest users it seems, but not many seem to be posting . C'mon lurkers, we don't bite, come and say hello and give some ideas of what can be done to get you to post more

[saracuse]

Thanks for the compliments!

Our esteemed Admin seems to have disappeared for the moment, but another thing he could do is send out an email or pm to everyone on the forum letting them know about the overhaul, that way some of the people who don't check in much might be inspired to visit and post.

Things do seem to have picked up here lately though, now if we could just convince Tom Wells to start posting here more, we'd have this forum set!

[Admin]

Sorry for my long absence everyone, I've had a terrible time recently of broken down laptops mixed with family issues.

I used one of your fabulous banners saracuse as the header for the forum. I'm still working out some coding to add some links to various other Kasabian sites to make the Kasabian internet world a lot more accessable to navigate through for the fans.

Tomorrow evening I will do some updating to the bootleg section and send out a PM and a tweet to try and promote the forum further. The place seems to have picked up nicely recently, which is great to see!

[jaybee1978]

I don't think there are enough new threads being posted.

The old forum had a good vibe to it but I think a lot of people were getting disillusioned with it anyway.

I still think that we should have been told that forum was being removed. The management seem to be only interested in taking our money.

[cassabian]

I'd love to see the forum more active! I'm sorry if it seems like I jump on every new thread that is posted, but I get excited and well, I love talking about Kasabian, so....

It seems we gain at least a few members every week, we just need them to get posting!!

[martmulholland]

I think this place picks up when theres new kasabian news but we just need ideas for when the news is slow to keep the forum ticking over

[helsbels72]

I tried to get the Happy Birthday thread up and running but I was the only one who ever posted on it!

[martmulholland]

That was a good idea, i wanted to post a thankyou for my birthday but didnt want to ruin your run of posts lol