A general purpose forum - can they exist?

Hey guys, ive had my personal forum link (www.tomstill.co.uk/forum) in my signature for the past few months.

The forum is used, mainly by my college mates/personal friends, discussing very general subjects, music, sport, internet links of interest etc, and of course the very general lounge. We also have a small space for our footy team.

Is it possible for a general purpose to attract a wider audience? Do people sign up to such things? I just want to freshen it up a bit more, and some new members would be good.

I was hoping to move from small personal, to a slightly larger community. Out of the 80 odd members, 15-20 are regulars, we have a good post count and some interesting discussion.

So any ideas? any ways to get more people onto a general purpose forum? Also examples of existing ones would be very good

Regards Stillt

Go for it! Excellent Forum and I was like "WOW" with the post count!

I would seriously advise against it. Websites of this nature are almost impossible to promote because they target no specific niche. You would also have a hard time finding any advertisers that would want to advertise to such a generalised demographic.

I very much understand what your saying jon, and i do realise the problems with it.

Saying that, im not after world domination, or to make any money from this site, its purely a personal hobby/time passer.

Im just after a few extra people, to add...some freshness, or any ideas that would get a few more people on board.

Enthonia Tech, thank you very much for your kinda comments Maybe you should sign up :P

The only thing would be something like a competetion.
Sounds like a nice forum

Look at some of the huge website networks: About.com, Suite101.com, AllInfoAbout.com, BellaOnline.com, etc. Take a look at their general categories: Music, Movies, Business, Technology, Education, Science, Travel, Sports, Food, Health, Jobs ... I think you get the idea. They're all general purpose sites, but they do well because they segment the site to reach different groups. Of course you could try to do that with a forum. You would just need to separate it into different sections. You could promote the site as a whole, and you can do separate promotion (slightly adjusted banners and such or linking on niche sites to specific forum areas) for each topic in the forum. The good thing about a forum like that would be that readers could "cross over" to talk about their other interests. Personally, I'd love to see a forum where I could talk about everything from freelance writing to business to languages to music. It would be great to see it all in one place, almost like building a little online town with lots of small shops, rather than just a small niche community focused on one topic. It would be different, and I think you've got a good idea if you handle it properly. And w/ a good idea, why not make money? It's great that you want to do this as a hobby, but bringing in some ad revenue wouldn't hurt, and it could cover the hosting fees and such, especially as your audience would grow.

Excellent post jhmattern.

I would think there are better things to invest your time and money into though. It's just too hard to pull off.

To be quite honest, if you weren't in it for the money you wouldn't have posted here asking for advice about it, you'd just let it grow on its own and not show much interest into its promotion.

I haven't really seen many successful all purpose forums. Although I did see one that lasted for a little while.

MikeRoweForums.com - a few years back Mike Rowe registered the domain name MikeRoweSoft.com and Microsoft came after him. His site recieved alot of publicity back then and the member count was up for some time but I just checked his site again and that place is dead now. In the end I think he recieved an Xbox and some other stuff.

That site had a lot of different categories back when it was popular but it looks like it went back down to only a few forum categories.

Most users ever online was 4844, 01-26-2004 at 02:16 PM

Do something to have a big company come after you and maybe your site will get swamped also

yes, it's worth a try. you'll need lots of luck to really reach the big public, but it's surely possible. you just need a catchy domain name, some loyal members, and a good promoting strategy. but it'll be hard, because you don't have one thing you're specialized in so you can't promote it like for example 'harry potter forum', but you'll just have to say 'catchynamehere forums'. anyways, starting with a few mates is the best thing you can do, as you have a good base to strat from when you're doing it like that.