How do you use forums?

I was chatting with a member here who talked about using Slack channels to get info. He said this specifically about a Slack group that he belongs to:

[SIZE=16px]It has thousands of people in one place, who are all talking about various topics. It’s quick, active, and you have access to lots of people with varying expertise. In short, I wonder if a forum is going to be much use in this climate - or whether the time/energy would be better put into other areas.[/SIZE]

I don’t think that Slack and forums are mutually exclusive. One is ephemeral and designed for quick answers, while the other is a repository of information which offers the chance to engage.

I’m curious as to what you think.

@HAWK what is said is very true about slack and forums. Nowadays the usage of slack as a tool to maintain the community (mostly by technology & design communities) had increased drastically. But still slack can’t take over the advantages of a forum.

In Slack, it promotes quick and fast engagement but fails to maintain the chronology of discussion. Slack is more a single threaded discussion platform. But the best part of slack is that it’s a good tool to talk to everyone in the group and interact privately, Which helps in building networks, finding mentors, etc. Also, slack is handy for developers/designers because he/she will be online most of the time and easy access to the updates.

Forum in the other hand its multi-threaded and promotes deeper engagements than slack. Multi-threaded discussions help the member to focus on a particular topic that he’s interested. The forum also provides activity log and stats of each member and which help us to identify the pro-active members which are good for the growth of the community. wherein slack this part is still void.

It’s very hard to conclude which one is good for a community. Where Slack help to improve networking and relationship and forum helps to learn and solution seekers. But to select which one should use completely depends on the vision and the mission of the community.
This is my quick and vague analysis. What do you think?

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I’m very new to it but for me Slack is like standing underneath a waterfall, it’s just a deluge of thoughts and comments coming at you and there’s even a sense, for me, of having to “keep up” with the flow because interesting stuff may be scrolling up and off the page. I therefore find forums much more natural for me, better organized and great for learning.

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I think your analysis is bang on @jaisonjustus (welcome to the community). I think Slack is great for specific topic focused chats (it worked brilliantly for our Ask the UXperts session this week), but it doesn’t work well as a broad community building tool. It can be daunting for newcomers as @SteveCrow points out.

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I really like this quote. And it’s very true. +1

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