New forum, no one posting!

My forum is about 2 weeks old, what I have found is that poeple join each day, usually anywhere from one to three with a current membership of around 100.

The problem is no one is posting? My copywriter and I are using alias names, about 15 to instigate discussions and I have had only one real person respond so far.

Threads:45 Posts:
144 Members:
99 Active
Members:88

Any ideas?

URL is in my profile

Pete

 

2 weeks and 100 members already?! What exactly did you do to advertise your forum? I also noticed that you are on the first page of google search. That is a huge advantage!

I'm not sure what to suggest to get people to talk, but you can't expect everyone to talk. From all the people on AA, we do not have many that even start topics. Sure there seems to be a lot of conversation going on, but if you look at the number of members and compare that to the number of topics, then you should easily notice a large difference. A lot of people will not start the discussions, but will gladly contribute in a discussion. Don't expect members to start posting and conversing with others right away.

Stats taken from a large forum:
-14 million posts
-1 million threads/topics

Thats a 14/1 ratio! So with 14 of your "created" members you should get about 1 reply! Sounds about right? You will be talking with yourself a lot!

Once the conversation is started, then its easy to contribute.


Just some of my thoughts, and Good luck!

Outdoor-Fishing

 

You could cut out a few forums.

Mostly though, I have members that make over two hundred posts a day. If you are going to start a forum, your work does not stop with setting it up - you also need to champion its activity.

 

Sorry a bit off topic, but I did a calculation of the post vs thread ratio for AA. Guess what?

AdminAddict Statistics:
Posts: 68,093 / 5K = 13.6 round to 14
Threads: 5,437 / 5K = 1.4 round down to 1

That is also a 14:1 ratio!!


Outdoor-Fishing

 

a few too many sections for the traffic you have, IMO.

having "wordpress" in your URL makes the URL longer than necessary, and makes it harder to remember.

if you could make it audioforbooks.com/forum , you have a chance of people remembering and returning by typing the address.


btw, in your profile link, you have an extra "http".

 

Hi Outdoor-Fishing,
Thanks for the detailed response, its very reassuring actually.
Yes I new I was on Google for one of the main search terms, but not all yet!

When I first finished building the forum I decided to link to it but not open it until much later. I put up a notice to the affect that the forum was not yet commissioned but would be in the future, subscribe to the newsletter or check back from time to time, check to see if it is up, and running.

During this time people were actually joining at about the same rate that they are now, I saw this as an expression of interest and thought well if I have 50 or so members joined that they might be eager to participate!

So opened it, emailed the announcement to all my site members, issued a press release and really expected to see a little action by now.

That is why I am so concerned, partially as enough threads were started to make it easy for any one to respond.

Yes, a long story about that situation, I have been meaning to post a request about how to rectify the situation in the VBulletin forum about how to set that straight. I know how to set up a 301 redirect for the home link; it is the rest of it I'm not sure about.

 

while you're at it, get some opinions on whether to continue forwarding

audioforbooks.com to audioforbooks.com/wordpress/audiobooks-review-section .

is there some reason you don't use the base domain by itself ?

I would put information and links on audioforbooks.com ,

and put the forum on audioforbooks.com/forum

 

Yes there is a reason, long story short its all to do with migrating from my main domain and wordpress to just wordpress using 301 redirects.

The forum in the wordpress directory was my mistake, I am going to fix that.

 

It turns out that about 90% of my registered members were spam bots!
No wonder no one was posting!

 

That was my first guess.

I had the samething happen to me when I first luanched my forum. I was getting 2-3 new members a day which turned out to be spammers. They don't start spamming right away either. It could be a day or it could be a week but they will eventually start spamming. Anyhow, I wouldn't delete these people, just place them in the ban list. This helps your numbers to look good and keeps their info on file for banning reasons.

 

I'll keep that in mind...:yes:

Outdoor-Fishing

 

Thats exactly how it happened for me, it fooled me as I thought there was interest in the forum and launched it before I had intended too originally

All members are now screened during registration using a hack that checks against the data base at Stop Forum Spam and no more issues so far.

I deleted my spammers, but banning may have been the better option given your comment that ots build the member ship up, the spam being used were signature links.

We live and learn...

 

What a bummer. Well at least you know that it's not your fault, and we also know why they weren't talking so much.:lol: Those spammers...:nailbite:

Good luck!!

Outdoor-Fishing