I have a forum, which i get about 5 signups a day .. about .. beside getting more traffic since right now i get about 500-1000uvs a day, how do i get more people to stay and chat at my site, i have a very interesting site, which was told to me by every reviewer that has been there. it has an active arcade which should keep people happy because of the friendly competition. please help me get more daily users
Honestly , the forum looks generic and is full of ad , you have a nice idea , but why PHPBB , it sucks no offense , if you want a free forum software try SMF it could work out better, and i hate having to scroll to the side to see your content . Just my Honest Review
jpl691, you should read this. Improve your community registration & posting rates in 3 simple steps. - http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1681 googleminigames.com, smf is free but this is not a good option in term of seo. SE spider hate session id and the board will not rank well. Phpbb is not safe, easy to hack. My vote go to vBulletin. Hope this help
http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15288 Those long strings will also possibly make the url go supplemental. There are ways to not allow spiders to start session ids but this will cost more than a vBulletin license.
Held a contest whoever join, and posted upto a certain post count will win some prizes, this way it might actually help your forums to stay alive and more sign-up.
thx for all the input, someone said something about scrolling over? what is ur screen set at 800x600.... geez. and yeh vbulletin is nice and all but its $$ i dont have right now .. so i went with phpbb.. which im quite happy with so far
To attract visitors your forum MUST be active. Try to get a solid user base. To start off you should spend 2-3 hours in the forum every day creating new topics and responding to people. If I were to start a forum, I would do at least 50 posts per day.
Of those 5 new daily members how many stay? Content is what brings in most people, so if you work on who is already there, more will naturally come. Offer incentives for content posting (I say content posting, because one-liners don't help and should be discouraged). The rep system can cause headaches, but for the people that are well liked it can pull in better posts from them, and can encourage those that do not post as often to post more in hopes of getting some green. There is a "thank you" hack which can serve the same purpose, look for it on vbulletin.org.... Speaking of vBulletin, you should likely upgrade. The paid forums seem to work better overall and have wonderful support, and a nice selection of semi-supported addons. It's well worth the $160+30 or even the $85 yearly for a leased license. You can set up a subscription system for paying members and they should more then cover your costs of the upgrade. Just be sure you give them some perks like a larger PM inbox, bigger avatar, custom titles, and maybe a 'gold member forum'. Make sure you have a custom skin, as the basic skins are just that... basic. Though an important note on skinning, make sure that the register button is easily seen, as I started on a skin where people were having trouble finding the blasted link. That REALLY hurts the reg rates... Either way, with 5 new daily members, that's pretty good... keep it at that and focus on those members rather then new ones. A happy community will grow on it's own, so make your community happy!
Money is a good universal prize. However always try to find something to give away in a competition that has almost 0 value to you but LOADS more value to a member. i.e Give away a month long 1 way backlink to your site if you have good PR and it targets your members. Give away a month long subscription to your site if you have a VIP area. Give away knowledge. There's tonnes of prizes you can give that have a very low monetary value to yourself. Be imaginative (moreso than the things I just plucked from thin air) and you should find yourself with increased sign ups.