Edit: I just realized I put this in the wrong section, hope a mod can move to general discussions or something I just found an awesome way to increase activity on my forum, without doing any work. I found an rss feed for forums on this funny video site www.clipswtf.com. I made a funny video section on my forums and added this rss bot. The clips site adds 8 videos per day, so the forum bot adds 8 new threads each day. That's 240 threads per month and 2920 threads per year. Not only that but average views per thread is about 15 (my forum is small ), but still that's 3600 pageviews extra per month... and it doesn't cost me a penny!!!! Also not to mention that some of these videos get a lot of replies from the users which keeps users on the site and increases activity Here's the link to the Multimedia Forum (Look at the WTF Videos forum) http://starcraftdream.com/forumdisplay.php?f=79 ************ Here are the instructions to add this rss feed: I only have VBulletin forum software, so if you have other software I'm not sure the procedure. I made myself a "WTF Video" section, but you can put this bot in off-topic or anywhere you want. I prefer making a video section, this way users can discuss videos from youtube.com or myspace.com, etc 1. Make a new user for your forum, I called mine ClipsWTF.com 2. Login to your admincp and open the "RSS Feed" menu on bottom. Click on "Add New RSS Feed" 2. Add a title for this Feed (I put clipswtf.com) 3. For url of the feed, put http://www.clipswtf.com/feed/feed2.xml 4. Check feed: Every 4 hours 5. Select the username you created for the bot and the forum you want this bot to put videos to Leave everything as is. For the Description, I changed from "more..." to "Click the image above to watch the video" Here is a screenshot if you're confused or something: http://aycu19.webshots.com/image/20978/2002802900512935282_rs.jpg *Edit 2*: Another thing I forgot is that 240 threads per month = 240 more pages indexed in search engines per month
Automated is not always good - however RSS if used properly is a good way to actually advertise a forum rather then post on one.
I think threads should be closed after at least 2 years, it was dumb opening this back up. and for those that do use RSS on your site, you are just advertising for the other party, as when a member sees this, he will just get a few words, then here click on the feed to the other site... (getting the traffic) so you are actually giving your traffic to another site...