Mobile Industry Review Forums are live!

Last night I soft-launched the Mobile Industry Review Forums.

I’ve held of forums for a long, long time. My reasoning was that if you had something to say you’d either email me or you’d post a comment on the site. One of the curiosities with the MIR audience is that — generally speaking — you don’t comment. When I’ve enquired about this with a number of long term readers that I know, the reason is invariably related to the fact that they don’t want their corporate security people to see them using a discussion forum.

One guy I know who works at at UK operator simply won’t use any of his corporate-issued equipment to comment at all, on any site, not least Mobile Industry Review. Instead he waits until he gets home and then sends me comments on the posts I’ve published that day.

So be it, I thought. I totally understand the commercial realities.

Now and again an issue will catch your imagination and boom, the comments on a post will flow for a little while. But that’s a very fleeting existence. Again, not something I considered a problem.

Recently, though, I’ve been running a test BlackBerry Messenger Group for any MIR readers who’d like to participate. And it’s been brilliant. Utterly brilliant. I have really enjoyed interacting with smart people across the day on the subject of mobile. So I wondered if there is room for a forum on the site.

I’ve been toying with the idea of blocking search engines from the forum and making it entirely private — that is, you have to be a member to read any of the content. I thought that might make things a little more intimate. I’ll canvas opinion on this subject.

Meantime I am rather excited to present the MIR Forums.

You do need to register an account. It’s fairly straight forward. I used phpbb as the platform (I did give a lot of consideration to vBulletin but phpbb looked a lot quicker to get up and running).

I’m hoping that the forums will give you and me the ability to continue to interact with other smart, thoughtful readers independently of the MIR web content. Please do give the forums a try out. I’ve posted a few topics to get things started — but please do hit the ‘new topic’ button and pose your own questions and topics.

See you there!