Meh... how come my site rarely gets intelligent members join?

Seriously, is it because it's so Nintendo related in the style and what not, or is it because the internet in general dislikes the community or something? I can get new members fine, it's just no members above about 17 seem to stay to be regular members.

Any ideas?

 

It's most likely due to the nature of your niche; it's mostly overrun with children, so your forum follows the same pattern.

 

The Nintendo forums I visit regularly seem to have mostly mature members.

Do you maybe advertise at places where there's a younger audience? Like, maybe you have links to your site in a signature on a forum you're very active on that has younger members?
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No in all those cases.

 

I don't know then. Maybe your first group of active members were younger, so now it's just mostly younger people that get attracted to it now, don't know really.

 

It baffles me as well. I never join sites like Nsider, and I haven't been at Gamefaqs since at least 2007. Maybe it's something to do with all the Action Replay codes.

 

It's our niche. Gaming related forums will always attract a younger and more immature crowd.

Once one joins, if they find they like it, they tell their friends.

Same thing happened to me, but they eventually came around to be on par with the more mature members of the forum.

 

Consider it an investment in the future of the forum and keep moderating it well by removing the topics that appear to attract the immature responses and create new topics with a more mature questioning to attract some of the more interlectual perhaps older members attention? Not sure if that would work as I've not had the problem.

I used to run a car enthusiast website for modified cars and although you'd assume 17+ year olds should be on there, as that's the age to drive here (or was then, I think it's still the same?!) it actually had loads of under 17's on there and it was anoying.

What we did was go a bunch of car shows (ones you need to drive to) and promote the website there, turns out it worked and we got loads of 17+'s but we still had the underage numpties just checking out the models section and whatnot. Bless.

 

That is my guess as well.

It just seems to me the DS/DSI targets younger kids more than older mature kids. Older kids probably spend more time playing on an XBox or PS3. Our son is 7yrs old and him and all his friends have a DS/DSI. He's in Taekowndo and they like to show up early and play games.