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Forum Descriptions

Nebulous's iconNebulous

Founder of Off Topix
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Do you dislike it when forums have overly long forum descriptions. Like a paragraph or longer?

Do you put any thoughts into your forum descriptions?
 
I like 2-3 liners, they aren't too long but actually look like the owner has put some effort into them.
 
I'm not to bothered with how long the descriptions are. If the title is good enough I don't need to read them anyways. I only read them if necessary and when I do I like them to be detailed, it doesn't bother me if they're long as long as they are good.
 
They should be brief, short, & to the point. A paragraph is too much, I usually only read descriptions if I'm unsure if a post belongs in a another forum. Although, most of the time I only read the forum names and pay little attention to descriptions.
 
I normally only have a few lines when it comes to forum descriptions. Its boring and annoying having basically a paragraph.
 
Those aren't long descriptions at all. They are simply 1 or 2 sentences. At any rate, I don't have a problem with short descriptions like that. It is the longer ones that drive me crazy.



Like this place. This forum has 6 categories and about 8-10 forums in each of them. Each description for the forum is a least this long, if not longer.







Anyway, I try to keep my descriptions at 1 or 2 sentences. The only sections I don't have this for is the guest areas.. and the descriptions are informative. Unfortunately, I have had a lot of lazy people who sign up to my forum and say that they don't know where to post, because they don't know what sections are for which due to the forum names, when all they have to do is use common sense and read the descriptions. I use board names that I believe will grab people's attention, and I use the descriptions to inform them as to what the section is about.



But whether the descriptions are long or short, you will find that some will complain either way. So you can't please everybody.
 
Sometimes it's ok to have a good description. I don't like to see 1 lined descriptions. It looks better when its fuller anyways. And the Admin's took some time to write it up.
 
Black Angel said:

Yes that is exactly what I am talking about!



Anyways, I hate when all the forums have confusing weird names.. Then a huge paragraph of nonsense describing what the forum is about.

Forums like that, I just click the back button. I like straight forward, simple, easy to navigate forums.
 
wow Black Angel they are really long.



A note all webmasters should be aware of which is very important. If your using an seo mod on your site the meta description of the forum page is usually taken from the description you write so make sure it has good keywords and thoughtfully written for both humans and bots and spiders. Remember the meta description tag is the thing most used for the description under the title on the returned search engine results so make it good to get people to visit your site.
 
I've set up my forum descriptions to be as simple as possible but for the user to know straight away what the forum is.
 
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