I know one of the best ways to jump start a forum aside from a contest is to pay people to register and post. This is great and all but I am looking to find people that will stick around even after the payment stops. Potential Moderators if you will, or even just community members that will be around. Does anyone have any good ideas of how to go about this? It seems like most of the people responding to the post on a forum for money topics are jumping ship as soon as they get paid. Furthermore, if you are interested in becoming apart of a Gaming community and forum let me know, I am willing to pay for the first posts, but only if you think you are interested in sticking around and trying to help make the forum successful. Another alternative would be special status. www.gametomb.net If anyone would like to check it out.
i have checked your website there is nothing yet on your website i mean to say categories and other stuff.
jus chk this http://www.theSenorita.com/forums I firstly worked on the categories/logo/$100 contest and everything and then asked people to leave suggestions you need to work on it. Think what you plan this forum to become and then itself go ahead and ask people to come to your forum
Just a suggestion, maybe get rid of the white background on your logo image. I figured I would keep my categories to a minimum while its small but I have a decent list of cat and subcats ready, and I was thinking of using a similar ranking system like DP has, from a game starting low and working up. Anyways, is there any place that I could search for reliable members that would get paid, but be in it for the long run, or at least not for 2 hours and then never back again? Or am I stuck getting the initial boost from paying people to come and leave. Just so people will stay that are interested and not be turned off by my low numbers?
I suggest investing in a vBulletin license mate, it'll do wonders for the look of the site (but you will have to pay more for a redesign).
@Platefish - I quite like my design now, and although it is with phpBB and it is free I have no reason to switch to vBulletin yet, if you have any info to change my mind I would gladly consider it. But if the only reasons are it takes more time to mod and handle a phpBB board I think I will stay put.
I am a long time PC gamer, going back to the middle 1990s with doom and quake1, then onto quakeworld. Before I was playing games on the PC I was on the super nintendo, and before that the artari playing pong and pac-man in the early 1980s. Lets put this bluntly - your site is going to have a had time drawing visitors, much less gamers. The skin is too dark, the right hand column makes everything bunched together and you have excluded major sections of the gaming community. You have one section for PC gamers - bad, bad idea. People like me do not play console games, and your site is over run with console sections and sub-forums. You have 17 sections (forums and sub-forums) dedicated to consoles, and one PC section? To give you an example, this is how many people are on steam right now playing different games. Steam stats - http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats Concurrent Steam Users: 1,027,936 Peak Steam users: 1,190,811 So you give 1 - 1.19 million PC players one section of your forum? And this is from just one program, Steam which is put out by Valve corporation. What about Quake4, or Quake wars, and all the other PC games? Maybe you should look at what people are playing, and open forums to attract those people, instead of opening forums for what you "think" is popular. Consoles are pretty, but they are junk for online multiplayer gaming - the mouse of the PC is so much smoother. There is a large group of players that do not like or play consoles and you have excluded us. Counter-strike is one of the most popular online games ever, and you gave one little section for those millions of PC gaming fans? Maybe you should rethink your forum layout and what types of players you want to attract. As a PC gamer I see no reason to join your site.
Unfortunately I had just not done that section of the site, I have it planned as follows: -Computer -- Retail -- Non-retail --- Pay to Play --- Free --- Open-Source --- User Created ---- XNA Or something around that set up I am sure I will end up changing it a couple times. Those were my computer categories, I will have 2 to 3 styles and a lighter and also an expanded version is already planned. Thanks for your advice.
kev, it would be great if you could take a second look at my site and see if the parts you disliked are better.
The lighter background is nice. Some of the big players in PC gaming are: Valve software - these are the creators of the half0life series. ID Software - they made doom and quake, what more do you need to know? Epic Games - they developed the Unreal series Blizzard - world of warcraft, diablo, warcraft 2, diablo 2 Lets take a look at the fan base for these games: The valve software (aka steam) forums - Threads: 201,269, Posts: 2,320,931, Members: 117,905 ID Software has lots of games spanning about 14 years. Just one forum, for one game - Threads: 25,161, Posts: 355,605, Members: 55,313 The unreal forums - Threads: 136,986, Posts: 1,905,046, Members: 82,972 The blizzard Forums - There are so many of these it would be almost impossible to give a number of the registered users. But here is one forum stats - 47,951 users have contributed to 238,715 threads and 260,845 posts. With these 4 forums we are well over 200,000 users. And you want to give PC games one little bitty section on your site??
I have taken your advise and tried to make my site look better, be easier on the eyes and also have a more in depth computer gaming section.
I'm still only seeing the one computer gaming section, did you make them viewable to guests? And try adding sections for popular MMORPG's, heres a list of the top like 10, click here then click Top 10 MMO's, they also have the top FPSers and a few other types listed that might be worth adding as subforums.