Signing up but never posting

[guez]

I have noticed that 6 registered users out of 10 never post anything in my forum. I however use a pretty standard e-mail validation message. Is this standard ratio?

Thanks

[rogerd]

That sounds a bit high, guez, but it depends on your forum. If lurkers can access everything that members can, only those who expect to post will sign up; if members can access more, then you would expect more signups by confirmed lurkers.

One thing to watch out for are password e-mails that get zapped by overly aggressive spam filters at AOL, Hotmail, etc. - perhaps some signups never got their login.

Something else to check, if you can, is how many of the non-posters have returned to visit again - if your software sets a cookie upon registration, it could update the "last visited" date for you to look at.

[boredguru]

hi Guez

Even I face the same problem here. Many users vist my site and register, And post nothing.

I feel that they feel find hard to find a way to post in the forum. May be they don't know.

What do you think if we have some tutorial or some simple presentation file in the site to educate them to post.

[kodaks]

Thats a good idea. You should include an indepth tutorial in the welcome email. Best of luck!

[thaedge]

Not that this would explain the other 5 people, but from time to time I will join a forum to see what page is linking to my site.

If I get enough traffic I will peek in to see if they are stealing bandwidth or just to see what people are saying or prompting them to jump over to my site.

Very rarely do I ever go back, unless the above happens again.

[kodaks]

You could also try to send a personalized email after a couple of weeks of someone not posting anything, asking if they need any assistance.

[Teknorat]

When this happens I try to add something new and interesting. Then I send out an email telling evryone about it. If you can hook them into just one thread you have them.

[viggen]

My ratio between sign up and actual poster increased conciderably after i added a section called "I have a question", this is now one of the busiest forums and most frequently used by first time poster...

cheers
viggen

[rogerd]

I agree, viggen, on one forum I found I had many posters putting up "evaluate my situation" requests in various inappropriate spots. I created a topic for Evaluate My Situation, and it drew many first-time posters and became the most popular topic.

[rogerd]

I just ran across an interesting forum option that could be used to stimulate posting by lurkers. As far as I know, it is a third-party hack for a few of the major packages. It's sometimes called a "lockdown" hack, and it restricts some content in a thread to those members who have posted in the thread. It can be used to hide links to pictures, downloads, etc. While apparently used for nefarious purposes by some boards, I can imagine that creative forum owners could use something like this to encourage members to post; I saw one suggestion that a modification could hide all but the first post from non-posters. Perhaps that's not the best conversation dynamic, but it would also insure a "fresh" reaction by each person joining the thread.

This feature would be annoying if overused, but might be a stimulant to first-time posters.

One possible application would be an "Introduce Yourself" thread which enabled members to read about each other only after they had posted their own bio/introduction.

Anyone tried something like this?

[vkaryl]

I have "introduce" threads on all my fora. They work pretty well overall (keep FIRMLY in mind that 95% of my fora are private though!)

I like the "Tell us about your nick" type threads too. Or those which ask about age, what part of the world you're from, what pets you have and the funny things they do, what hardware you own (um. MACHINES, guys! That is, y'know, COMPUTERS....!) What's your favorite car? Why? What's your fav music/movie/band? Why?

Human interest in a machine oriented world.

rogerd: I haven't so far needed to do your tricky thing with introductions. Most people are only too happy to add their bit to such a thread.