In my experience, a lot of new readers to a weblit serial won't start participating in the forums of a site until they've completely caught up with the story, largely because forums are often jam-packed with juicy spoilers that could ruin important reveals and plot twists. One way you can encourage new readers to migrate to the forums sooner is by fostering an environment that takes care to prevent unnecessary spoilers.

One great way to do that is to provide tools to your users to easily hide spoilers within a topic or reply. Here's a Drupal module that does just that:

Drupal -- Collapsible Text
Collapsible Text is a module for Drupal that allows you to cordon off portions of a text and hide them within collapsible blocks. Here's an example. Click the "spoiler" link below to expand the text:

Spoiler

This text is an example of text hidden within a collapsible block.

The module is an input filter, meaning you can make it available to users -- in my case, I found it useful as a way to contain spoilers within forum discussions.

Collapsible Text is available for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 5.

BBCode Spoiler Tag
If you don't use Drupal, you're probably using some forum software like PHPBB, vBulletin, etc. Nearly all of these support BBCode, a sort of HTML-substitution markup language. Since BBcode is extensible, you can easily add a spoiler tag. There are quite a few of them, and they all work in different ways. I suggest a Google search for 'bbcode spoiler' and find the one that works best for your situation.

Just today, Char over at The Peacock King added bookmarking functionality to their site. Registered users of The Peacock King now have the ability to bookmark any post on the site, and anything you bookmark shows up under a "My Bookmarks" section of the user's control panel.

This is great for someone like me -- it may be a week or more before I come back to the site to read a new chapter, so being able to save my place is a big help, and ensures that I don't abandon the story halfway through just because I forgot my place. Further, since there seems to be no limit to the number of bookmarks I can have, I can bookmark certain chapters that I find notable or interesting.

Since bookmarks in Drupal are only available to registered users, they become a selling-point for getting your readers to register for an account. If you add the feature, be sure to let readers know about it.

If you want to see how it works, hop over to The Peacock King using the link above or the image to your right and register for an account. It's free and you'll get to read what is, in my opinion, one of the best pieces of weblit writing on the web right now.

The bookmarks module for Drupal 6 can be found here, and the developers of the plugin have said it'll be fully supported in Drupal 7 by the time D7 launches. There's also a Drupal 5 version, which I'm going to try to implement here on GabrielGadfly.com, but I haven't taken a look at it yet.

Wordpress users can sort of emulate the functionality with the Instapaper Read Later Links plugin, though it relies on the user opening an account at the third-party Instapaper site.

Blogger users, I'm afraid you're on your own. I don't know enough about that format to know if there's anything that could possibly emulate this functionality for you.