I just had an interesting conversation with a forum support services client, so I thought I would share the general idea with everyone here. One of the most important priorities of every forum owner should be to ensure that your forum is easy for members to find on your site and easy for them to sign up and register. Also, I know it was much more difficult to do in the past, but it's quite commonplace now, if you have user accounts for your site and user accounts for your forum, have the databases linked together so that your visitors only need to sign up for one account. Also, always make sure that your registration settings are set correctly and when a user registers they receive an email in their inbox either telling them a mod will approve their registration or giving them the confirmation link, or if you don't require verification just welcoming them to the forum. Use your mailing lists! If you have inactive members, send them emails to entice them to come back! If you hire a company or a freelancer to provide you with forum posting and 'boosting' services, then you best make sure they are able to get started without sending you notes telling you they can't register and login. Most importantly though, if you want your forum to be successful, either make sure you are managing all aspects of your campaign yourself and know what you're doing, or when you enlist some help, if you selected somebody with experience you should listen to what they say and act on their advice, they've done this before. Good luck to everyone with their communities, I hope this helps some of you out there.
Yeah the registration thing is definitely important, especially if you're not using a well-known forum script as often the reg. link isn't in the "regular" spot. If you're targeting the less tech-savvy crowd, might want to use a graphic button as well to help them spot it.
thats a nice thing also do comments on blogs and forums related to yours nice way to get traffic and backlinks to rank higher in serps and good organic traffic. Thanks for sharing. Also contest work well i'm new myself only been up about three months.
Thanks for the tips. I'm launching my first forum and trying to integrate it with the look and feel of my site, I hadn't even thought of use registration yet. I better start working on that too
No problem. I always like to help, whether you're a client or not. Landing/Squeeze pages are really good for forum registrations. Some visitors who don't quite understand forums, or aren't used to them like we are... Like I mean a forum looks like a nice living room with a fireplace and comfy chairs to me these days no matter where I go... starting with an 8 color monitor and text based BBD system on a dial up INTRAnet... People these days never saw such things and would never bother to learn the workings of something so nerdy and primitive... Give them something that is in tune with the habits of today's surfers that gets your message across, and helps them to feel comfortable in your forum and use it well.
I beg to differ. Don't make user registration an easy process. That's what all sites try to do and most fail miserably. Ever since I stopped going that way, my daily registrations have really double and whenever I send a mass email I'll no longer receive any annoying "please unsubscribe me" requests as people will voluntarily register and know exactly what to expect. If people think that registering on a site is easy, they won't give any value to their registration in the first place. Why do you think that google works so much based on restrictive invitations if the service will be free some day anyways? You don't want 30 000 ghost members, it's much better to have as much as 30 good members that are actually interested in participating and bringing your forum to life.
I don't think you don't beg to differ, you see things very similarly. Thank you for clarifying that though, you make a very good point I didn't bring up. Perhaps you misread what I was saying though, I was referring to sites where users aren't able to register. Where you register and you have an account, but you still can't post, because the site has 3 different user systems for the 3 different scripts in use... Or manual account authorization by admins, that check their messages once a week or less. You'd be surprised how many people out there are scratching their heads as to why they aren't getting new members and active members, when their members actually have no possible way to make a post no matter how hard they try. On the flip side though, Nuno Brito, I think I'd rather have the 30,000 inactive members, I'm rather confident if I have their contact information that I will be able to convert them into active users more easily than finding new ones... Google uses the restrictive invitations because they already have 30 million free users, they can't test their new stuff with that many people, they need tech savvy individuals that are going to help them work the bugs out, not email them complaining that their BETA system doesn't work.... Around in a circle I go, lol. You have inspired quite the debate with myself. Thanks for that. Cheers.
eheh.. Yes, there are also advantages in having ghost emails as long as they don't belong to spammers. I guess it all comes down to knowing how to use all these things at your reach to make the site more popular or promote something.
I feel left out. Can I have some details too? teehee. Hey RectangleMan, how much work you reckon it would be to merge mybb into wordpress_mu/buddypress?
More work than it's worth imho. Unless you want to be the project developer and share the work. I'd wait till MyBB 2.0 anyways even if we are years away from it.
Yeah I figured your answer might be something like that. I've been looking into all the options, the forums they have in buddypress suck.. Oh well... figure something out eventually... Cheers.
This weekend was a record for traffic. Both Saturday and Sunday had over 40,000 visits each. Yesterdays Alexa hit 4082 for daily rank. This site can be an Alexa 5k site in a few months.
That's awesome. Your site? Nuno_Brito, I haven't forgotten about you, just been busy working on clients' sites paying the bills. Hope to talk to you soon. Cheers.