Help us test our forums!

[Jeff Hester]

Greetings, SoCal Hikers!

I’m looking into ways to help build greater community here, and want your feedback. These forums are here on a trial basis. Whether they stick around or not will depend on you.

What could forums do? Well, they give everyone a place to share ideas, trail reports, gear reviews or ask questions. Forums make it easy for everyone to participate.

Please give them a try. Leave a reply. Start a new topic. Let me know what forums you’d like to see, and whether you’d come back to use’em.

Thanks,

Jeff (SoCal Hiker) Hester

[Jeffrey Zinn]

Digging the forum idea, Jeff. This could be a great repository of trip ideas, meal ideas, gear discussions (no doubt to be heated debates), closures/warnings, story swapping and so on.

[ADKinLA]

Sounds like a great idea to me! It could help with finding cool trips or trail closures, and generally meeting other people around SoCal.

[Tim Miner]

I agree with the guys, it could be a great tool for coordinating outings. Plus, the added value could be to hikers like me in other parts that plan to venture into your neck of the woods. I say go for it.

[Derek (100 Peaks)]

I am considering implementing this, as well. So I am curious to see how well this works!

[Campfire Kam]

I really like the ideas of forums. I specifically search for forums when looking to visit new trails.

On a geekier note, message forums are excellent for SEO. Your forum participants are going to be using the keywords you want to rank for without thinking about it and will use language that ‘normal people’ will be using when searching. I think it is a great idea!

One recommendation is to make sure you can make certain topics ‘sticky’ so they stay at the top of the list and don’t need a bump. Also, ‘off topic’ boards are nice to have in case we want to start talking about unrelated things such as the best taco stands in our area 😉

[Marcie T]

Do you have any tips for family hikes? We are all beginners.

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