5 Best Online Coin Forum Communities
Numismatists are always looking for new ways to find information, or to garner help with questions and queries. In this age of information technology, where answers are available at the tap of a button on a keyboard, forums and blogs can be a useful source of information and help from like-minded collectors. And there are a myriad of sites out there that offer to bring the coin collecting community together, allowing people all over the world to communicate together at the same time. A collector in Britain could be talking to an expert in ancient Rupees in India with just a few clicks of a mouse.
Here we look at a few of the best online forums for coin collectors everywhere. As they say in all the best talent shows on television, ‘in no particular order’.
Coin Talk
Don’t let the out of date “Happy 4th of July” banner put you off, this is a great site with easily navigated areas to suit all tastes. The home page highlights the newest threads, as well as giving a very brief welcome message. Its frequently asked questions section covers lots of information, from copyright to user accounts to blog usage.
Outside of the Homepage, each page has a bulleted list of the most recent threads allowing the user to keep abreast of hot topics. It would be nice to see a latest news board, so numismatists can keep up to date with the latest happenings from the world of coins.
The forum page is nicely categorised into different sections, and there is something to please all. There are tens of thousands of posts on a huge variety of coin related subjects, though many are a few months old. Help is often asked for, and responses are plentiful. Click on the forum tab, and there’s a sub-page that details all ‘today’s posts’, a useful feature.
The blog page doesn’t seem to be visited to the extent that perhaps it ought to be, but that may be because the forum posts are so plentiful.
One annoying feature is the list of adverts at the top of every page, though being a free site this is perhaps the best way to monetise traffic and help pay for its administration.
Only registered users can blog and post replies to forums – not unreasonable – but you also must to be a registered user to contact the host. It would be good to see page that highlights other benefits of registration.
All in all, Coin Talk is a reasonably presented site with a family feel to it, but room for improvement.
Coin People Forums
Coinpeople.com has a professional look, with a brief welcome note that highlights a couple of the benefits of registering on the site. Again, there are adverts at the top of each page, but registration means that you don’t have to suffer any banner ads. It also points out that some formatting and links are not available to unregistered users. Registration is free.
Once more on the homepage, there is a list of most recent topics added, and the forum sub-pages are handily sectionalised which makes it easy to navigate to the required specialist area. There are some cool interactive features (including an ugly coin competition!), that can be navigated to from the homepage as well as listings of a whole host of resources for numismatists.
There is a calendar feature on this site, which allows registered users to add events, and a clickable window through to Ebay offers. It also features contests and give away deals from the coin collecting community
Easily navigable, loads of information, and a friendly community of nearly 9500 members. Consequently, this site has a good flow of daily traffic.
Coin Community
CoinCommmunity.com is probably the busiest looking of the sites, and doesn’t have a navigation bar. All topics are listed in section boxes on the homepage, and this includes an active forum topics guide. One good feature of this style of navigation, once the user’s eyes are accustomed to the melee of information thrown from the screen, is the easy indexing of information that it allows.
Clearly it is a site aimed at the American market, and has some in depth information about US collectors’ coins, and the active forum topics are almost 100% about US coins, old and new. However, there are some forums for collectors interested in coins from other parts of the world, and these are worth looking at, too.
Once through to a forum page more options open up to the user, including a site search engine and a search facility to be directed to coins of choice on Ebay.
There are the obligatory adverts at the top of the page, though these are box adverts for coin dealers and sellers. Registration is free, and the ‘join now’ link directs the user to an information page before signing up.
Lots of information on this site, and forums are reasonably well supported, but it does take a bit more practice to navigate easily than the first two.
Coin Network
The Coin Network is like a social media site for coin collectors and numismatists, a site that allows members to build an online portfolio of collections on his own ‘my page’, and discuss those with other members.
Again, easily navigable from the navigation bar, each page has a column on the right hand side, which has links to the latest news in the numismatic world. The members’ page has easily followed guides to site usage, and highlights some of the benefits of membership (which is free). Forum pages are well visited, though areas of interest are not categorised – so a lengthy search could be needed, even with the site’s search facility.
However, further into the site there is a page that holds details and links to 159 groups that have been set up by members of coinnetwork.com. This is a useful feature, and most collectors’ interest will be catered for here.
One feature that this site has over and above the others talked about is a video section that hosts videos from its members. This alone is worth the visit. Then there is the blogs page, with 250 blogs to date: a little under-supported.
Finally, the site includes a resource page, which includes details and links to a whole range of other sites that will be of use to coin collectors everywhere.
Deservedly in the top five forum sites.
CoinForum.info
This is not a forum site like the others discussed above, but deserves to be in the top five because it gives links to at least 15 other sites that will add value to a coin collector’s web usage.
Enter this site, and you are presented with a list of the latest coin news. Each item has a tickler, and then can be clicked on to access the full listing on a different site. The downside is that these items are not in date order. A user would, perhaps, expect to see the most recent news item at the top of the list, but they seem to be posted in some ad hoc order.
The left hand side, where might usually be a navigation bar, is populated by a list of valuable websites – forums, blogs, and news – that numismatists visit for up to date information, news, and views. Adverts on the site are subtler, which is quite refreshing.
You can visit CoinForum.info here.
