how do you measure the activity of a forum? is it about posts? members? both? something else? personally i look at the amount of posts the forum gets per day, and the amount of members who post on the forum regularly. (i think this would be that they log onto the forum at least twice a week, and make over about 20 posts.......i dont know, what do you all consider posting regularly on a forum is?) i dont think the size of the forum matters, cause a forum with hundreds of members and thousands of posts might be inactive, cause a lot of those posts might have been made a long time ago, and a lot of the members might have only made 0 or 1 posts and not come back, and there might only be a small number of the members who come on and post regularly, yet there might be a small, fairly new forum, which might only have about 50 members and a few thousand posts, but might be active cause most of those members post regularly.
Have a forum that would be considered small by many admins on this site, and it has limited growth potential based on the population of interested humans. I measure activity not just by numbers of members, posts & threads. - frequency of posts/new threads (not just volume) - forum sprouts them 24/7/365 - number of long-time members, obviously the forum is valuable enough to return to - steady flow of new membership - somewhat consistent (or growing) month to month, never mind some slow days - activity of new members - do they continue to return & post - members show they "know" each other through the forum, they are familiar with regular posters Overall, consistency & growth of members who stay involved is a strong indicator of whether the forum is accomplishing something, I think.
IMO that's an important beginning to attract more members. Few people are keen to join a party if no one else is there (or doesn't appear to be.) I think it's far more important to have active posting, conversations for newbies to join in and return to see replies, than to have more members but little posting to read/join.
I've been looking at member retention more lately, trying to draw up what a good metric would be. I haven't paid much attention to what the typical score on most forums is, unfortunately, and avoiding turnover is impossible (we've had two deaths : ( )
I like seeing the posts/ day and the number of members who visit in a day, but I also like looking at my Google Analytics to see how many visitors I'm getting.
