November’s Website of the Month contest winner was the popular Kindle Users Forum. We caught up with the founders to talk about where the idea came from, how the community developed and more…

Tell us a bit about yourself and the Kindle Users Forum.

I have been a self-employed web developer for a number of years, but The Kindle Users Forum (or KUF as our members generally call it) is my first venture into actually running my own forum. Running the forum does require a lot of time and effort, but is very rewarding as it is the ideal opportunity for me to indulge both my creative skills and my passion for reading. The Kindle has definitely changed the way I read for the better; it has introduced me to many new authors and reminded me of my love for the classics.

Where did the idea for a Kindle-themed forum come from?

The idea for KUF was conceived whilst I waited, like thousands of other people, for Amazon to start shipping the Kindle in the UK. There was something like a 6 week delay between pre-ordering the Kindle and it actually shipping during which time I and many others were chatting and generally getting excited on Amazon’s own boards. Using the Amazon boards highlighted a few shortcomings like the lack of moderation and any real structure, so I had a thought about creating a dedicated forum more suited for long-term use. In truth, I hadn’t expected a great deal of interest and was very surprised when the members started rolling in.

How did you market KUF and attract members initially?

I had made quite a few acquaintances during the few weeks in which we were waiting for the Kindle to ship, so I mentioned to them that I was starting a new forum and thankfully they were interested enough to come along and register. It’s the getting started that proves most difficult as a forum will have very few posts and generally look a bit bare during its launch period, so I did find myself starting a lot of threads to encourage discussion. I think that KUF has been incredibly lucky to grow so quickly and most of the success can be attributed to the quality and inventiveness of our members’ posts.

Social media also plays an important part in any marketing now, so we also have Twitter and Facebook pages fed by the forum and these are starting to gain in popularity.

Forums are known to require plenty of management. How do you manage the forum effectively, and what tips would you give to someone thinking about building a community?

Thanks to our very dedicated moderators and a very amiable membership, running the forum is more of a pleasure than a chore. Naturally we’ve had a few problems with spam and trolling along the way, but this has been dealt with swiftly and decisively in each instance. We have a strict zero-tolerance policy for certain types of posts, but on the whole our rules are fairly lax as we want to spark discussion and not stifle it.

To someone who is thinking about running a forum, my advice would be to think carefully about what you will or won’t allow on the forum early on and stick to it. Deal with spammers as quickly as you can and don’t let their posts linger – show them that they are wasting their time. Value your members and try to accommodate their needs because they are the most important asset your forum has. Finally, and most importantly, make sure you have enough good moderators and listen to what they have to say when discussing the running of the forum.

What are the biggest challenges you face running the Kindle Users Forum?

For me personally the biggest challenge is structuring all of the information and features available from the site as there is a huge amount of content in addition to the forum front-end. There is so much to tell everyone and so many things that they can do as a member of the forum that it’s proving a very difficult job navigationally. I guess there are a lot of our members who have only used a fraction of what’s on offer purely because they don’t know about it. I aim to address this more in coming months, but it’s not proving easy.

Aside from this, it’s also a personal challenge to keep away from the forum because I enjoy it so much that I spend many, many hours on there. Sometimes this is behind the scenes adding new features, promoting or just answering emails and private messages, but often it is chatting and engaging with our members.

Why did you choose to host your forum with Heart Internet?

When the forum was first launched it was on a regular shared hosting package with Heart, but within a few months I realised that to take the forum where I wanted, I was going to require a powerful dedicated server so I opted for a quad core solution from Heart. To tell the truth, I didn’t even shop around because I knew that with Heart the pricing was going to be very competitive and the technical support excellent. The server is running like a dream at the moment with 230 days uptime (which would be much more if I hadn’t rebooted a while back in order to install some new software), and thanks to a serious amount of RAM I can run some very hefty caching to keep not only the forum, but all the other services running behind it as fluid as possible.

How did you go about asking people to vote for your site in the Website of the Month contest?

Well, we were quite fortunate in that respect because of our membership, so it wasn’t much more than telling people that if they liked the forum the could vote for us and a bit of a push through Twitter. I was very surprised to find out that we won though, because there were some great looking sites nominated.

E-readers are still an emerging market. Do you think that they will eventually succumb to tablets or will they hold their own?

I do believe that eventually there will be a convergence between tablets and e-readers and the first step toward this has been the Kindle Fire in the US, but it will never truly happen until either a much more responsive, colour e-ink screen or a dual LCD/e-ink screen becomes available as this is so critical for many users. LCD screen tablets like the iPad work fine for occasional reading but when you are talking about reading sessions lasting several hours, nothing currently can compare to a dedicated e-reader.

What are your top three Kindle books?

That’s quite tricky, but at a push I would say:

• Remix by Lexi Revellian because it introduced me to indie authors and was our first ever book club choice.

• A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin as this is a great series and is now available on the Kindle.

• The Wayfarer King by K C May because not only is it the second part to an excellent fantasy series, but it is also a fine example of how just how good a properly formatted Kindle book can look.

How do you intend to develop the Kindle Users forum further in the future?

The forum is growing quite rapidly since its launch just over a year ago and we already have a ton of features – the forum itself is in some ways just the surface because in addition we have web services for Kindle like an RSS news reading system, a Kindle TV guide which is updated every day and even a full shopping guide for Kindle accessories and covers.

Aside from Kindle specific features, the forum is very much about books, authors and publishers so we have a very unique Kindle book recommendations system, many ways for authors to connect with their readers and together we have also published a few Kindle books which are anthologies of stories written by our professional authors.

The way the site evolves in the future depends to some extent on the way Amazon directs its product line. The Kindle Fire is very exciting and we already have a dedicated Kindle Fire forum section, so if/when it comes to the UK I think this will have a major influence over this part of the forum. Ultimately though, the future will be determined by the needs of our members.