What Makes Forum Members More Active

What you are the key points that would make forum members more active?

For example at DP you would always find hundreds of repeating members.

 

Better and consistent moderation would be the number one motivator for me!

 

Moderation is the big key and always have a active staff. Perhaps make your staff create a certain amount of topics each week. Keep the forum active with new content is a plus.

Have contests once and awhile as in referal contest or win free banner advertising contests. (Make up rules of course). Keep your forum members motivated to come back and post in some threads. If i had a few more beer's i'd have better ideas.

 

I think you have to becareful not to over-moderate. Monthly contests about best threads might work, the "top poster" contests don't generally result in quality just quantity.

 

Excellent Moderation is required, apart from that make sure that suitable and respectable comments are included if not in all then most of the posts

 

Having posts on hot topics also might help, just a thought.

 

When you start a new forum you need some active staff that will keep the forum active and entertain the new members with new subjects to post their thoughts on.
After you gain some members it's a good thing to make some contest like poster of the month or so to motivate the members.
But just like for blogs and sites content is the king.

 

Making posts under different user names helps keep a forum looking active. Forums are not the easiest thing in the world to get off the ground. However, once they do, they can be a very good money maker! Good luck!

 

You can also learn from dp forum .
Try to open a bst section, it is a platform for webmaster to make money and buy items/services.
It must boost the forum quickly .
The problem will be how to maintain the bst section. lol

 

Thanks for some key points by our fellow members.

I hope it helps me ...

 

Thats a good idea. For new forums its sort of a problem to have enough buy sell ads.

Then again everything takes time I guess.

 

Good moderation makes all the difference as seeing spam for this and that just turns me off.
Also a revenue sharing model may just be the answer, because if they are motivated to earn from something like Adsense, then they are more likely to be active in the forums, but don't stop there, the more your forum members post after certain threshholds they get access to certain features that will benefit them even more by posting on the forums.

Something to strive for like a contest like others have said above, may work well, a regular contest or competition to win ad space or some other highly coveted want would make me aim to win it.

 

"get shared and to share" that is the key to motivate me

 

Make it UNIQUE

 

Wecosmo, on this board and over at sitepoint, in the past you have portrayed yourself as quite a board owner, commenting how well contests work and how well posting in other boards work (Which of course they do not work.), along with giving pointers in other threads on how to run a successful board, so shouldn't you know the answer already???

 

I made some progress for sure. Contests and many other techniques did work pretty well so far. Thats why I got this stats in 14 months:

Threads: 9,162, Posts: 75,266, Members: 2,763.

Then again, I never stop learning. Who knows I might have a very nicer idea from the suggestions you folks make here

 

Excellent Moderation is required

 

How did they "work pretty well" if very few are posting now, and haven't for quite awhile, and, most of the ones who did sign up in the year's time haven't come back?

Just curious.

With all boards, very few members are active on a continuous basis. It's the small group that keeps the board active, while just about all of the others remain silent.

The secret, if you can call it that, is to keep advertising the board, to keep bringing new members in. That way the new ones who will be continuously active will replace the old ones who eventually leave.

And so on and so on....

 

Its certainly an ongoing process, as you said. We do have members active with us who been with us since the beginning pretty much. Lot signup, never came back. Lot does come back once in a while. Thats how it goes I guess. Good thing is number of active members has grown significantly as the forum is growing.