Review of Forums for Korea

In my surfing time I’ve come across a number of forums or discussion boards about Korea in English so I thought I’d review them here:

The most popular site I have found so far is the Korea Bridge Forum. There are 15 conferences, the two most popular are the general discussion and jobs related forums. Postings made are moderated on all conferences, so they do not appear immediately. They claim over 700 users and over 15,500 posts.

The LifeInAsia site has created conferences for South Korea. Split into two halves, there are clubs for the main cities and provinces and then a separate set of discussion forums for topics such as teaching, buy and sell. This does make it very difficult to target a question or announcement since at least half the forums have no postings since the start of 2006.

The Korea Times website hosts three boards Talk Box, Study board and Market place. Postings are on average 2 a week.

The Seoul Times also runs a bulletin board, however all the postings this week seem to be spam type adverts.

The Korea Infogate site has 30 “clubs”, for different interests, however most seem to be completely dormant.

The Seoul city council website has a community page where you can post want ads or find friends. There are 7 items in the "for sale" conference since Jan 2006.

The Korea Joblink site has a forum section: 15 postings in the market place section since July. The job discussion conference has 15 postings in September.

Seoul Selection (home of The Marmot) has a forum section. There are 10 conferences, most have recent postings. Not many have any replies or followups. They report over 350 users.

SeoulStyle.com has a link to usfkforums.com. Also divided into 10 conferences, it is mainly aimed at military expats.

Dave’s ESL cafe has 8 conferences in the Korea section, focusing not only on teaching English but also travel, current events, technology and buy/sell. The site claims over 12,000 users. You cannot tell how many are in Korea but all conferences have very recent posts many with followups.

The @llo Expat site hosts a large number of country specific forums. The one for Korea has 17 separate conferences including 3 each for Seoul, Busan and Daegu. Most of the posts have no replies, some that do are advertising posts that have not been deleted.

The Tour2Korea website has various conferences for discussion on topics including learning Hangul and Korean events. Not many postings in any of them.

Another Expat site www.expat-blog.com has 16 conferences split by continent. The Living in Asia conference has 32 posts since Jan 2006.

The Lonely Planet run a very popular travel forum called The Thorn Tree. The conference on North Asian countries is dominated by questions on China, HK and Japan. Those on Korea get answered quickly and accurately.

Trip Advisor has a forum for Korea, it receives the occasional question, mostly from North Americans venturing into this part of the world. Posts are sporadic averaging two or three a week, but there were 8 today.

Forums need to reach a critical mass. In my opinion the Korea Bridge forum has reached that size. The number of posts indicates a regular number of people that post and reply to questions for it to be worthwhile using.
So my suggestion, if you'd like to ask questions about Korea to as wide an audience as possible, is to create an account at Korea Bridge and ignore all the rest, however Dave's ESL forum does seem to be very popular.

I am tempted to suggest to the other Korean based sites to abandon their forums and just put links to Korea Bridge, it would increase the traffic for all concerned. I'll let you know what their replies are.