At a time when there is a lot to discuss in the world of Tranmere, why not take your conversation to a forum packed full of new features and totally free to use?
Since we decided to add a forum to our website once again a little over a year ago, after an initial spark of excitement, interest dwindled away. It didn’t surprise us; there are at least two established forums elsewhere, plus social media has lessened the popularity of the traditional forum in recent years.
However, looking around social media channels and some of those other forums, it seems as though some TRFC fans may be on the hunt for a new online home, so we thought it worth putting it back on the radar.
After taking a significant period of time to review potential forum platforms, we settled on XenForo and invested in the license for the software along with a back-end hosting solution to support it.
XenForo powers some of the biggest forums online today, including IGN, MacRumours, AVForums, ScrewFix, What Hi-Fi and Digital Photography World. These are significant communities with a tonne of demanding users. There is also a significant number of football forums on XenForo which serve huge Premiership club fan bases.
In addition, it also provides the most modern of forum features to all members. The list of functionality includes:
- ‘Likes’ for posts – quality content and discussion is rewarded with users able to give ‘likes’ to other user’s posts.
- It’s mobile friendly. Try it.
- Ignore or follow selected users – if some posters irritate you and others interest you, then you can choose to ignore them permanently which means you won’t be shown any of their posts.
- Easy embedding of media content
- The forum is secure, covered by an SSL certificate
- Private chats and group discussions
- Themed threads
- Promotion of good content: Points and trophies are awarded for posts, based on hitting milestones and receiving likes from other users. We can also put a lot more work into this area so helps us manage content.
- There are lots of options for us to update themes, use forum add-ons and other functionality as users require
So, we’ve got a pretty powerful piece of forum software sat here waiting to be used. While we truly value our small band of occasional posters, we’d love to see them joined by more!
So, give us a try at www.roversrearguard.com/forum. We’d also welcome any feedback on the forum and suggestions for how you’d like it to look.
