Ever been gravely inactive?

Has your forum ever gone into such a deep period of inactivity that it appeared so dead and showed no signs of recovery? If so, how did you react? What steps did you take to recover? Did you ever even recover? What was your overall take on the experience?

 

i am at the moment

i dont really know what to do about it, so i hope someones got some suggestions

 

That's my forum right now.

I kind of have a lack of motivation to restart it, but I know if I make a bunch of posts and bury the inactivity a little bit it will be as good as new.

I probably need a few people to help me out, only it's hard to find people in my niche on the Internet.

 

If your forum is in the 'flatline' state with no activity or members joining then you have to decide to go one of two ways. Either put the forum out of its misery and focus on an entirely different niche.

Or, decide that you want to invest more time and effort into promoting/marketing and modifying it to help with whatever aspect of the site needs modifying.

If you are going to try to resuscitate the forum, then you need to see where your forum needs the most help.

• Is the content lacking?
• Is it the navigation of the site that needs work?
• Are you enticing visitors and guests to join?
• Are you getting members returning to the site?

In all of these examples, there is a good amount of work to do.

Is the content lacking?
If you do not have great content pertaining to your niche, then that is probably the main reason why you do not have visitors or members. You CANNOT depend on your members providing the content. Either you (or others that you have designated) add news, articles and stories to your site or risk losing a TON of time and energy in 'hoping' that your site takes off.

Content in the form of threads and posted responses must be plentiful. Even if it is just you and a couple of members 'talking' back and forth, it will work. There are lots of folks that will become interested enough to join in on the conversation or at least sit and read what is going on.

As the overused cliche states...'content is king'.

Your content will keep visitors on the site for longer which will give your advertisers more reason to buy an ad spot on your site. It will also help you get more topics on Google where you get those great hits. On my WDBoards.com site, for example, I get 78% of my 20K+ visits per month from Google. So, make sure that your content is there!

Is it the navigation of the site that needs work?
I had an issue with folks getting around on my site due to the default vbulletin navbars. There were too many links and not enough of an easy way to navigate the site. So, after adding a new menu and soliciting advice and suggestions from members, I was able to get a better way to get around my site.

This allowed for visitors and members to both get around the site more and get more interested in different aspects and areas of the site. Which lead to more members and more participation.

Are you enticing visitors and guests to join?
So, with the navigation and content in place, I have visitors and members strolling around the site more, getting interested and participating more and being able to give some good info to our advertisers to get some funding in place for additional features to be added to the site in the future

But, some admins have all of this down and STILL can't get guests to sign up as members.

That's where 'features' on the site help. Member-only features are a sure-fire way to get new members. Some suggestions are to have member-only downloads or features such as a 'radio' or 'video' player for those who sign up will help get your membership numbers up. Once you have your members in place, then that's when the next step kicks in

Are you getting members returning to the site?
So, you have content going, you have folks cruising the site and you have membership numbers up....but, now you need additional visits and/or 'reminders' for members to come back and visit.

Well, the content alone should be able to generate some return visits, but some members just need a little 'push' to get them back on the site and also get them participating more.

I've done this in a couple of different ways.

I've added 'reward' type of items in the form of "WDBucks" (vBcredits renamed) and a 'store' to redeem those "WDBucks", the WDBazaar (vBcommerce renamed) as well as limited edition 'icons' (images 'sold' in the vBcommerce using the icon-itemtype add-on) that the members can display everytime that they post.

I also used other methods such as the Mass-user Private Message combined with the 'Inactive users' mod. I then send 'personal' and 'generic' private messages to my members (after editing the 'message' out of the PM email notifications) and that prompted lots of return visits.

And finally, a newsletter mod or emailed newsletter will always help in keeping the members informed and interested in your site.


If you do these things, you can reinvigorate or even start up a site with lots of success! Good luck!

 

My gaming forum is very inactive right now. While I had a posting contest, it got lots of traffic. But after I stopped the contest, the traffic dropped to nothing.

I have thought about having another contest, but I just dont know. I am not wiling to have a posting contest every month just to keep traffic going - its not worth it in the long run.

Right now, I'am thinking about closing the gaming forum and being done with it.

 

Yes, my forum is in it right now. Last night though I added an article section where I will be adding guides for games and consoles though, so hopefully that might pay off a bit in the future.

 

Gaming is a tough niche, but not impossible.

Similar to the Disney niche because there are tons of sites (millions of sites when I first started doing research on it) and lots of pages competing for attention.

It just means that there needs to be MUCH MORE promotion and marketing done (via Twitter, Facebook, other sites, etc) and with as little money as possible. You need to look for banner exchanges and link exchanges and anywhere (non-adult related sites, etc) that you can. Go on other sites and participate in their conversations and have a little link to your site in the sig field (where allowed...always follow each site's TOS) and get cross-promotions running.

Instead of a posting contest, how about a promotion contest where you assign a promo ID to each person on your site and the person that gets the word out the most and gets the most traffic based on clicks from other sites or something gets a prize. You have to be careful for 'cheating', but it's worth getting others to do your site promotion for you.

Go to gaming social network sites and put your information on your profile. Do everything that you can to get the word out. The only way that your site will succeed is if you put work into it. It just doesn't happen by magic.

 

I do not have the extra time to dedicate anything to the gaming forum. I have my main forum (over 1.3 million post and 29,000 members), a youtube video blog, and a self hosted wordpress blog.

Just posting the youtube videos takes up a lot of my time. then there are the articles for the blog, moderating my main forum,,,,,. All of that does not leave a lot of free time to promote the gaming forum.

 

I've got much the same problem as everyone else whose posted here with my own forum, which has lost activity for nearly no reason at all. Not so much for lack of promoting (or at least, I've tried quite a bit recently), but almost as if the community in general has lost interest in itself. My problem though is it seems much of the community (aka, other sites of a similar topic) want nothing to do with me or anyone who's allied with me in anyway, and won't respond to emails or anything asking for links/affiliates/content submissions, etc.

 

Fortunately I haven't hit a lull which I'd consider "grave" but in the off season when we can only reminice about prior experiences there are a few sure fire topics I know will heat things up again. I keep them in my back pocket as not to get over played.

With the college and HS baseball season having already started and MiLB & MLB on the way this is the time where my activity level shoots up.

 

I've occasionally resorted to sending ideas/links/Videos to members I know support the community, and suggesting or outright asking them to make a post about it. They are usually happy to oblige, and it makes the place look busier than if I'm doing the posting.

 

Most of the forums seem IN IT right now lol.

 

^Ditto. Although for me, the fact my forum is down doesn't help any matters.

 

I think it's the Niche in general Nick, I see the same happening on AdminExtra as well. They've been high profiling that prize draw to try and boost things. But it's not worked from what I've seen.

Maybe you should think about changing the forums Niche more seriously now. But I don't really see how you can do that with so much stuff posted here all being admin based? I guess your in a tricky situation really, but it's been very obvious for a while that both this and other Admin Based forums have lost their interest now a days. I'm not saying that trying to be funny or anything. Just being honest with you.

Admin Extra, on the other-hand. Have shot themselves in the foot I feel. They've been told by a number of members to remove that very annoying "Widiya" tool-bar, and still persist on using it there. Also, I'm not sure what they are loading in the "header" first (I've not checked the source code). But it's causing problems with slow loading of the forum. They really are not helping themselves at all one bit there!

 

Right now. It has no means of advertising besides my word-of-mouth. It's a general discussion forum and my reasons for having it are simply because I wanted my own small community, and I wanted it to last. However, since I've long since stopped promoting in ways that annoy people, and since I have much less free time, it's harder to get people to even take a look.

Even now, however, there are several old members who still come almost every day, and manage to post quite a bit without spamming. I don't know why they care so much, but I try to keep them entertained by posting interesting new topics whenever I can, and putting the time into replies whenever I can. For example, just started a topic about greed, and gave it a unique twist by examining several quotations about greed, including some submitted by a member of my forum, and one by the ancient history author Tom Holland.

In any case, I have no plans to close the forum. Even now, I very much like foruming, and I like that there are a lot of memorable conversations. Also, two members of my forum recently moved in together in real life, which was really cool. It feels weird to think that both of those members met at my forum, and at least one was there due to my personal invitation.

 

Yeah it has been, I then promote more.

 

One of my forums used to be very active (Its a local community forum). However as I was putting so much time and effort into it, eventually came the burnout. It got to the stage where I couldnt even bear looking at the site.

For about 6 months I didnt even look at the site as a guest. Luckily when I returned, it was still active, not as much because the mods got pee'd off (rightly so) and stopped posting which in turn stopped a lot of members posting.

Lesson learnt? Too right! Dont do too much at once

 

I had it 2 months ago, it stopped when I started to advertise on YouTube and Facebook.
I own a gaming forum and I advertise on the Machinima Facebook page, I make contests for members who can make the best video about the forum etc.

Good luck.

 

Unfortunately I am going through this right now, and I am feeling quite overwhelmed by it. I have attempted to get friends to post but they keep forgetting so that doesnt appear to work right now. I know once the word gets out there people will start swarming in so in the meantime I keep creating threads so there is something for them to participate in.

Is it worth creating 'troll' accounts to get the conversation going, but its not obvious that you are talking to yourself? LOL

 

My Illinois Skywarn forum has done that... At first it was depressing because its the largest IL Skywarn forum on the internet. Then I realized why it was inactive... simply because there isn't a lot of severe weather activity going on which is the founding factor of the Skywarn program So on the slow months, I take it easy and focus on getting to know members and developing relationships, then once severe weather starts getting active again, we go full throttle and go all force into that