I am not a regular to a lot of these forums, in fact I only frequent the two I think are the best on the net. This one and Forum Promotion, I doubt if anyone will disagree with that. What I tend to find on all these forums is literally the same group of people, all trying to promote their forums, as an exercise, I visited literally loads of "Promotion Forums", a difficult task in itself because new ones are cropping up virtually each day. What I find quite alarming is the amount of posts that some Admins have on these forums, it's ridiculous, hundreds if not thousands of posts, they even take up jobs on these forums as Admins, Community Leaders, Post packagers etc. My argument is that if they put all this time and effort into their own forums, they would be in a much better position. I'm not saying Promotion forums are wrong, but they seem to be a diversion for a lot of Admins who wonder why 12 months down the line their forum is failing.
Well, FP is a promotion forum and this is a webmaster forum. Honestly to group them together in one category is a flaw in and of itself. Anyways, I agree, it's a lot of the same people promoting a lot of the same things. I don't think posting a lot on these forums is a bad thing, it's bashing community interaction as a whole if you say that. If you think there's too many nowadays, think about the boom that happened several years ago As for admins having large posts on these forums, the admin always have a huge amount of posts, pretty much all forums have the some occurrence. I agree, some people spend too much time on these forums, but also not everyone has their own forum, so grouping everyone together is a bitttt much. I don't agree with your main point overall, however some of your other points are agreeable. Ah well
I would say they both appeal to the same group of people, forum owners. So putting them in the same category isn't really a flaw. Agreed, The most regular/active users of these forums are the same group of people. Once someone finds AF or another forum in this "circle" via a search engine or other means they will see people mentioning other forums in the circle and they will naturally check them out. I have seen people find AF through FP and others find FP through AF over the years. It is actually quite fascinating. At the start, I was one of those people who would spend countless hours on those forums promoting my websites and quickly racked up a few thousand posts on FP but after a little while I started focusing on my own websites and clients. I haven't really bothered with any other forums apart from my own and FP since I came back to the internet two years ago, I have made appearances on other forums, yes, but most of my time is focused on my own projects. I also agree that people should spend more time on their own forums than others but if people did that to an extreme extent it would wipe out promotion/admin forums because nobody would post anywhere. That is a bad thing, Admin Forums educate people about running a forum and they are a hub for advice and guidance. They are rich with information that new and old administrators can rely on. Just think if that information didn't exist? Forums would be in a very bad way. I agree that post exchanging and using "services" too much will damage your forum, and using promotion forums as a main source of traffic is a bad thing too - but Admin/Promotion forums are not bad in themselves. They do more good than harm.
