What are we doing wrong with our International IT Forum? | Hacker News Reader

What are we doing wrong with our International IT Forum?

1 pointadmonaut6 comments

Hello,

I have a question for the IT User here: In addition to our successful German forum (administrator.de), we also have an English forum with the domain https://rootdb.com/ We have translated the most important German instructions and moved all previous English content from administrator.de to rootdb.com. The portal went live in early February 2025. Unfortunately, we have only had four new user registrations since then, and no one wants to ask a question or post anything on the site. The German version, which is identical to the portal software, works very well.

Although we have many IT experts, especially in the areas of security and firewalls, neither Google nor international IT users seem to like us. We are not native English speakers, but we thought we had translated everything correctly. We also ran everything through a language AI to check everything.

Perhaps someone could take a look at the site and tell us what we are doing wrong or where our mistake lies. I would be very grateful. I don't know what else to do at the moment. Thanks in advance.

Many Thanks Frank

Problem - unfortunate site name / link.

It's probably among a very small handful of urls (that are active and not dubious) I have popped into a search engine like duckduckgo and get other sites first with no hit on the actual url I entered into the search bar. That is not a good thing.

Root'd comes up very prominently. Then there's software rootdb and I threw into the query - forum and IT and still getting top results for Root'd and a French support area for rootdb ... followed other rootdb support areas.

Google I tested last so it probably had enough from tracking me to the German site to throw up the right result after adding IT and forum to the query but not the url on its own where for me atm the linkedin announcement is the third result and hacker news entry today is seventh.

Since there seems to be a major project rootdb - it's also going to throw confusion to would be visitors who might have been looking for a suitable forum.

Could be anything from network to plain marketing and SEO.

I'm assuming the lack of new users is due more towards the marketing and search engine optimization of the new international site.

If a forum has very little posts to begin with or active users it may scare away new registrations. That could be the problem.

Another (personally) more glaring issue is the major differences in domain names. I would be afraid that they are not associated with one another and may distrust the international site altogether.

I'd recommend putting the English site under a "subdomain", such as:

en.administrator.de

That change should also improve your SEO I'd assume.

Cheers

Thank you in advance for your reply. We have already tried the subdomain 'en.administrator.de', but Google doesn't like it when English content is hosted under a .de domain. I can also rule out the network, etc. It can't really be SEO as the administrator.de site runs on the same portal software and SEO works well there. We've checked it with tools and, apart from a few minor issues, there's not much to complain about. My concerns are more about the texts or the workflow. Maybe our German way of describing things to users is different from the international way. Maybe we need to do it differently. But how? I'd be grateful for any tips or ideas.

Would you register if you visited our website? If not, why not? We would like to know and it could help us.

These are only my personal opinions and they may not be widely applicable, but...

The domain name "rootdb.com" makes it sound like the site is about databases. That's not a topic that I find particularly interesting, so I would have assumed that it's not for me from the start and probably would not have gone there.

I'm not a big fan of the organization of the site. When I first looked there, it was a jumble of miscellaneous topics. It wasn't even clear to me that it was a "forum" in the sense that I'm used to. (Still isn't, to be honest, but I probably missed something). Clicking on the forum link takes me to a search form. Since I'm new and not looking to search for anything, that isn't really helpful to me. I could be misunderstanding the purpose of this site, so forgive me if this is not a helpful thing, but what I'd love to see is the ability to browse by section with the posts in reverse chronological order. Being able to turn off the thumbnail images would be a bonus.

> Would you register if you visited our website? If not, why not?

I wouldn't unless I found myself using the site pretty frequently for a while first. Registration is a very big ask and I won't do it unless there's a very big reason to.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

> .. but what I'd love to see is the ability to browse by section with the posts in reverse chronological order.

Just a quick question: When you click on a topic under 'Forums', the latest posts are displayed. Am I correct in understanding that you want the latest posts to appear at the bottom (in reverse chronological order)?

> When I first looked there, it was a jumble of miscellaneous topics.

Well, this is an overview of all new posts in all topics. As we are a general IT forum, there are naturally a lot of topics. In general, the whole page is 'the forum' with different views (with topic images, ticker, stream).

> ..being able to turn off the thumbnail images would be a bonus.

That's what the ticker view is for. It shows the latest posts without thumbnails. As I said, we work with many different views to satisfy all users.

> The domain name "rootdb.com" makes it sound like the site is about databases.

It should be a bit like imdb.com, a database full of IT knowledge - not the database itself (although we do have that as a topic).

But that's what I meant by good feedback. Here in Germany we've had very positive feedback about the organisation. Internationally it seems to be different. Interesting, and thank you very much. I look forward to more feedback.

Frank

> When you click on a topic under 'Forums', the latest posts are displayed. Am I correct in understanding that you want the latest posts to appear at the bottom (in reverse chronological order)?

No, I prefer it the way you have it. Newest at the top. There's ambiguity that I didn't realize here: to me, "chronological order" means oldest to newest (how time runs), and "reverse chronological order" means newest to oldest (timeline running backwards).

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