Why do people sign up if they do not want to post

many forums contain leechers, or just ppl are who are to lazy to post, i have 3 "big" forums in my mind 15k, 12k and 11k and have a very low reply ratio

 

Lazyness is the biggest factor. I bet there are some people on DP who have been reading the forum for years and haven't made one post

 

On another note, once you have someone who has signed up - regardless of if they post or not, you have a valid email address for them.

Let your members know from time to time that your forum still exists and would be a better place with their input. I'm sure it wouldn't be so hard to do a query on the database to return you all members email addresses who have never posted - as they have signed up, its not spam.

 

I know I have signed up for forums to just post a reply to someones comment then I foget I have it. When I sign up for things I use a junk email so I never check it.....

 

The problem with soccer is that there are forum in all the major soccer sites plus major online newspapers have disccusion areas, so it can be very difficult to get a strong following.

 

you could make it so they have to post first before they can view. you will probably need a mod for this though.

 

There's actually a pretty good answer to that. A couple times it was because of one particular thread that got my attention in the first place, so I did post the one time, I suppose that was "the hook", you could say. But then after looking around further, there just wasn't much else worth my time to stick around.

Other times I suppose it was like you said, there were "member area's" that encouraged a sign up for full access. Again, I get into those "exclusive" groups and there isn't much that interested me, thus, a lack of posting.

I'd imagine there are other reasons too, like the generally short attention span of many/most internet users...

Not to mention like others have said, people are lazy, and don't do much of anything without an incentive of some sort. I'd be curious of the stats for a forum like DP, I bet a lot of people sign up just to leech and lurk. Especially when the forum is good like this one, the incentive of signing up is being able to see the private forums. It's not all bad though since you at least get an "opt in" out of the deal.

 

I read an article somewhere that said 90% of community users are just lurkers & don't like to participate.

One trick I use on my forums is to automatically opt people into email updates on the threads they participate in. That way they're more likely to come back & reply

 

Accually that's very effective.. sometimes I forget when I make a post, or even forget that I posted.. So when I check my email I get reminded