The Character Consultancy

Home Blog

What If You're Not A Social Media Wizard?

Part 5: The Hub of the Action

Instant chat facilities are one thing. Forums are another entirely. The original forum format is considered a bit old-fashioned nowadays and has partially been replaced with alternatives like Discord and other platforms that offer group chat. The one strength that forums have that chat platforms don’t is that you can open a specific conversation thread, making threads searchable for later.

As before, I’m scoring each platform by whether they:

⭐️ encourage individual commissions
⭐️ are reputable enough to encourage corporate commissions
⭐️ are free to post on
⭐️ are attractively presented
⭐️ make a good place to get feedback
💩 present no hurdles to overcome prior to posting
💩 present high potential for a toxic community (somewhat subjective; humour me)

Let's see how they get on!


DeviantArt

3/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
1/2 💩

The forums here are busy with a mix of serious discussion and light-hearted or troll discussions. Worth a look if you’re looking to increase foot-fall.


Furaffinity

3/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
1/2 💩

Just like the main site, Furaffinity Forums is specialised for discussion of issues relevant to the furry community. It’s quite busy and some of the people there can be overly keen to troll, but if you’re thick-skinned enough to tolerate that, then try it out.


NaNoWriMo

3/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
1/2 💩

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writers’ Month. This initiative traditionally sets the challenge for members to write a 50,000 word first-draft of a novel every November. The forum here is busy throughout the year. Note that the mods don’t like seeing marketing activity; if you’re going to spend your time here, do so as a ‘casual’ member.


Reddit

3/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
1/2 💩

Reddit has such a huge audience that it’s hard to give an accurate description of the response you’ll get if you post here. However, know that people on Reddit don’t tend to respond much (and may respond badly) if they believe you’re marketing to them, so a ‘casual’ approach is preferable. Your best bet is to find existing discussions and provide helpful information. If you're lucky, a number of potential clients may contact you via the DM system to ask for more information about your services.

As ever, your choice of subreddit will make all the difference about the overall tone of any responses you get.


Sofurry

3/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Includes a furry-specific forum. The forum here appears to have lapsed into disuse at the time of writing, but may be revitalised at some point.


Toyhouse

4/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

The forum here is very character-orientated with many threads being opportunities for people to show off their own characters, so you may or may not find that you fit in here. The platform’s a special interest one, plus it’s busy, so it’s worth a try!


Your own web site

3/5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
1/2 💩

Forum programs are available if you know where to find them, so if you can set one up, why not do so? Note that if you host your own platform then you will need a certain level of technical proficiency, including the use of databases, and these can be rather non-obvious, so this serves as a potential hurdle to this route.


Read part 5: Show Me A Picture

Credits

Title image by Athena from Pexels and used with their kind permission.