Encouraging More Posts

Best Practices: Guest posts, Topic Order, URL Drops...

[martinibuster]

I was looking over my forum and noticed that some topics were far more popular than others. They contained more posts, more threads, and more views.

Forum Topic Ordering
So I wondered,

• Would it be a good idea to push these popular forum topics up in the order of topics?
• Or would that discourage people from posting to the less popular forum topics?

Guest Posts
I currently don't allow guest posts, but I read another thread where someone posted that guest posts were their strongest source of contribution.

Aside from having to bot-proof posting priviliges, does allowing guest posts discourage community building at the expense of encouraging more posts?

URL Drops
Some members drop some incredibly helpful url's, amazing stuff. I'm really thankful for the url's they drop. I'm not having a problem with self-promotion. For my situation at this moment, allowing URL drops is working fine.

Any thoughts?

[vkaryl]

Hi mb, and how's the family doing?

I like URL drops - on my own private not megamegaMONSTERbusy fora. For places like here, I don't think so....

I have PRIVATE fora. Guest posts aren't, period. There's no way short of hackerish mussing about to guest-post on my boards. There ARE places/times/situations where guest posting is not only logical, it may even be necessary. I don't personally have experience of those, but as has been noted MANY times previously, I do NOT know everything there is to know about this thing, much less understand everything I MYSELF THINK I know about it, so my opinion is no doubt worth less than - um - whatever your preferred denigrator is today....

[rogerd]

Guest posts are good in the early stages of a forum. When you are starved for activity & posts, you'll get more with no barrier to posting. As the forum grows, though, the advantages get outweighed by the disadvantages - easier spamming, multiple identity posters, identity theft, and generally less responsibility by posters.

Topic order is an interesting question. I can't say that I've seen much effect on individual forum volume from where it is placed, though it seems logical that very visible forums might get more attention. I guess I'd lean toward putting the most popular topics in visible locations, along with the forums you want to try to grow. OTOH, you could stick a popular forum or two near the bottom just to be sure people scroll through the whole list. Overall, I don't think this issue will have a big effect on posting volume.

[boredguru]

Hi Everyone..

I am pretty new to this site. Once we tried points system in our forum and gave away prizes.

But the sad things is no one was eligible for the prize. Nothing seems to interst them. We are building a community website for Indian people basically chennai channel.

And the problem I faced when I allowed the guest to post is that they started to post nothing relating to that topic and some gave some worth replies but they never came back if the thread owners thanks him or replies him...

And now after sometime it is slowly picking up. I think it is all the time that matters a lot for any community to grow well.

[robotsdobetter]

Guest posting is really hard to keep up with if you get a lot of visitors. Visitors would spam, talk about stuff that's off topic and they would do some of the dumbest things such as posting fghfghfghf or say **** you and be rude on the forum.

In order for a forum to grow you have to get a great deal of visitors everyday and you got to make sure it remains fresh or no one will join. Why you think I joined webmasterworld over all the other webmaster forums? Because it's fresh and up to date.

[robotsdobetter]

Also I would like to add you need to have a good mix of members such as rookies, in the middle and experts. If you just have people asking this and that no one going to join. Why? Because most likely they are joining because they need help with your subject.

[rogerd]

Good suggestion about trying to develop a mix of posters, RDIB. I've been to some forums where 99% of threads are repetitive newbie questions. It's hard to build much of a community with a lopsided mix like that.

[vkaryl]

True, rogerd and rdb - because for one thing if ALL you have are newbies with questions, YOU wind up doing all the answering. Now I like to hear myself "talk" as well as the next guy, but "participation" by some definition or the other is MORE than just "me and thee"....

This is where I've resorted to hauling in friends of long-standing from other fora (some of which are long-defunct - like the rpg forum about 50 of us had on Delphi after BG1 came out.... but many of those folks are STILL good friends!) to help out with question answering and topic starting - you can answer all the questions you want to, but if nothing other than newbie question topics shows up, you still have a problem!

robotsdobetter is absolutely right: you NEED that mix....