Forum Posting?

[Lord Anubis]

Have to see, how have others gained traffic and had good posters on your sites?
I know most sites using TP + SMF are great looking sites, but gaining members/posters is something most forum owners have to strive for...

It is good to see others idears, and expand...

Personally it was easy when I had a warez site, but for general discussion sites it seems like a chore to get ppl to type

[JPDeni]

I was lucky. There was a site with quite a large membership that closed down. I knew it was going to go under ahead of time, so I got it set up and announced it just as the previous one went away. Most of the people came to my site.

As for posting, my membership is 99% (at least) women and women like to talk more than men do as a rule. Still, it seems that only about 15-20% of my visitors post. I get about 50 visitors a day, not counting guests and usually only about 10 of them post on a given day.

Another thing that helps is that there are things happening out "in the world" that have to do with my site. Mine is a fan site and the celeb that we are fans of has personal appearances and television roles that are announced and looked-forward-to and analyzed to death. During the times when there's nothing happening with him, it gets pretty slow on the site.

[Lord Anubis]

Hmmm good input, so I guess I break the mold of most posters
because I like doing it, rather than talking in most cases now because at least my post is there to stand...but I see your point most women are the ones to post in forums

When its warez or porn most are willing to post, but me changing keys made me see...

[Zetan]

I've pretty much given up with my site. We had a growing member base when I was running the audio streams. But, the member base I had that were active really wasn't into the Heavy Metal genre.. most were just putting a toe in to test the water, so to speak. I found that none of them really had anything diverse to contribute and that they were only clued up with current trends, the Killswitch Engage's, Trivium, and all the other mainstream bands.

Occasionally somebody will post about a band that I haven't heard of, with exception to the plethora of unsigned MySpace generation bands and black metal which I'd be happy for people to discuss, but is a sub genre I have little interest in.

So, it again comes down to:

• Internet saturation. There's a million sites about heavy metal. There's probably plenty of sites about a given subject, although JPDeni's site is one that is aimed at a particular fan base. A family site or a site aimed a local areas will often have a small but dedicated member base. My site did have a Google Rank of 3 at one point. I've purged all members with a zero post count, which is why the member count is a lot lower than it was.
  
  
• Time and effort. I'm happy to contribute to my own site.. But I refuse to become the only contributer of News, Events and Reviews.
  
  
• At what point do you step back and decide.. It isn't working?
  
  
• Having a niche as you've discovered, will generate traffic. Getting that traffic to contribute and post is another thing. Most people are happy to take without contributing a thing. Even better if they don't need to register.
  
  
• Back to saturation. Every man and his dog can have a website. There's too many websites IMO, all samey. About 75% of sites I stumble upon are Blogs. around a 3rd of those have lists about something or other. I'm sick to death of top 10's or whatever else somebody has decided to create a pointless list for.
  
  Being part of the team here, we see more SMF / TP sites than most. At a guesstimate, around 10% of those I've seen have been great sites that I might consider joining. The others, well, perhaps 50% no longer exist, the others are probably like mine, gathering dust and wasting bandwidth.

[mc]

It mostly comes down to basic marketting.

Make sure your site has a point, and offers something to members that they can't get anywhere else.
I've seen far too many forums set-up on a whim, with the expectation that people will post just for the sake of it, despite the fact that there are already succesful sites covering the same subject.

Make sure your site is viewable.
I hate people who come up with truly horrendous colour schemes, which distract when trying to read things. Horrendous colours can be good for identity, but not when they make things hard to read.

Don't have endless boards with no activity.
Nothing makes a forum look worse, than 20 boards with only a handful of posts in each one. For example, if there's 10 new posts apread across 10 seperate boards, but only 5 of those posts are in boards of interest to you, then you've either got to go in through each board, or ignore all the posts that don't interest you in the 'show all unread' option. Now imagine that on a site with a 100 new posts spread across 25 boards.
Lots of sub-boards can be good for referencing things, but for new posts, it means extra clicks to get to new posts.


For an example, I was once offered a domain for nothing, but I foolishly turned it down, as I didn't want to pay the transfer fee, and didn't have the skills to make the most of it, so the person who owned it let it expire. Somebody else registered it (who done alot of self-advertising of the fact he was a web developer/designer), launched a complete new site on it, along with quite a big name in the market area for the board, and done lots of flyer drops to get the name out before the site went live.
When it finally launched, I think there was well over 20 boards, and despite the pretty good and recognisable logo, the site design was horrendous to look at for any length of time (from memory I think the background was mostly white, with vertical palish green pin stripes), meaning you could only look at the site for a few minutes at a time.
What posts there were, were sparse, as people didn't know where to post, lots of posts were in totally wrong places, the webmaster replied to almost every thread.
One of my mates, who at the time was a webdesigner for a major company, tore the site apart, and was quite surprised by just how wrong the site was.
Basically, the so called webdeveloper/designer, managed to screw up almost every aspect of the site.

Needless to say, I stopped looking at he site, and having just checked, the domain is now just a holding page.
(I think I need to have a chat to the registered owner, who I've just realised is on my msn list...:-/ )


Now I'll admit some of my site attempts havn't been good, but I've always asked for criticism, and acted on it.
Some people get so far up their own a**e, they fail to realise that what they're doing is wrong. I've been known to delete days of work, and start afresh, because I've realised it just isn't going to turn out good. Sometimes you need to take a step back from what you're doing, and decide if you are actually heading the right way.

[Lord Anubis]

True...

I have noticed that going away from a warez forum, that it is a bit harder to get an active posting group...Although, they dont mind checking threads, reading, etc... but as far as participation, it almost seems that you have to force (ie hidden content, spoiler, or reward) in order for anyone to do anything...

@ Zetan - I am truely shocked you have an awesome site, but I understand your point what good is a forum if your the only one participating

I am trying to get an active community, but as far as I have seen from similar sites to mine is (99% are IPB), is by making a post to download games...

but I like seeing others ideas on how they have been successful with active members

and trust me I have followed all the rules

• All boards have a post
• Easy to navigate
• Unique site in general (lots of customization, not just SMF mods)
• Well advertised - unique registrations all the time
• etc...

[Zetan]

mc makes some excellent points.

As for my site, thanks for the comments. It has had it's moments, although I've really scaled the front page down a lot. I couldn't have marketed it any better than I did, we were listed on all the major audio stream listing sites, anybody local to me knew of the site. I found many local people just couldn't, wouldn't or were just too lazy to show support.. even friends, which I found disgusting to be honest. It hasn't been through a lack of trying. In no way did I expect people to post all the content for me.

I'm just as passionate about the music as I always was.. I bought 4 CD's from US distro's last week, 3 of which turned up yesterday and today. It's a shame that my ISP has been terrible the last year or so, it ruined the whole stream. Perhaps when I move to a new home, I'll set it up again and give it another shot.