Community chat board

If you meet infrequently, have lots to discuss or there’s a supportive/ friendship element to the club that you want to foster, consider setting up a chat room on your site. Setting up a forum or chat room is fairly easy – the challenge is in managing them well. It’s really important that everyone knows the rules of the forum and is upbraided if they don’t abide by them. If someone says something nasty and it isn’t challenged, your forum will soon become unpleasant for everyone. In many instances, you’ll actually want a commenting function for a specific page on your site. The free Pnyxe (pnyxe.com) generates a forum-like commenting system to individual posts and pages. People’s names show up in the comments thread and can respond to the overall topic or to a particular commentator. There’s a ‘report’ option if someone gets het up and says something nasty. Look out for emails about such issues and try to smooth things over.

To add a forum, log in to your blog then go to the account preferences page and choose HTML as the text editor format. Next, open a new web page and go to pnyxe.com and create a free forum account. Copy and paste the HMTL code that’s generated into a new Tumblr post.

To add a forum page to Blogger, go to the dashboard and either create a new post or click Edit to update an existing one. Select the HTML view and paste the code from pnyxe.com.