getting members in my forum!

I have a forum with about 40 members (but all pretty much inactive). In order to get more registrations i have registered a few members myself and made a few posts which seems to have worked a bit.

Not sure about my latest tactic though. Take a look at http://www.nottinghamstudent.co.uk/Forum.html.

Do you think i should make members register before they can see any posts? Well im going to try it for a week or two and see how it goes. Ill post the results here for people to see. Maybe it will help people create healthier forums.

Wish me gl
~Jamie

 

Making people register to read will pretty much remove 99% of all search engine traffic to your forum.

 

That may be true for large general forums but may not be the case for smaller niche forums.It's not a very big part of the site so i'm willing to test that and let everybody know the results.

 

I can almost guarantee that you will get next to 9 registrations like this. Hiding your posts is one thing, but the entire forums is another. Not many people are going to register at forums when they don't even know what is there. Additionally, mdvaldosta is right...it will remove all search engine crawling from your forums. This is actually very important for small forums...since you're smaller, you need every member you can get...While search engines might not bring you much traffic now, they will as you gain more content.

I'd recommend, at the least, to open your forums for guests. Make it so that they can at least see that posts exists. Just stop them from actually reading the posts. Even that might be too restrictive, but it is better than what you have now.

 

With all the respect GTAce, I am doing this as a test to see what actually *happens*, not what you "can almost guarantee".

As it happens so far these are the results:

Have had two more members sign up (which is more than ive had for a while)
They havent posted at all!

"I'd recommend, at the least, to open your forums for guests. Make it so that they can at least see that posts exists. Just stop them from actually reading the posts. Even that might be too restrictive, but it is better than what you have now."

Gonna red rep you for that just for you being stupid. If you had been to the link you would see that it says how many posts/members there are in the forum.

I am aware that you have "AdminFusion.com - Forum administrators and moderators" in your link so you probably have a good knowledge of this sort of thing, but sounds like your talking shite with no empirical evidence to me.

 

I was just giving my opinion on this...It's fine that you don't agree with it, but being so rude with your response was uncalled for...Good luck with your forums, but dont expect to get any advice from me in the future.

 

I apologise GTAce. I was out of order yesterday and not fair on you.

 

I registered on it for you!

 

Allow guests to view the content; engage in post exchanges, have a link to your forum in your signature.

That's what I would do to help try to get more memebrs to my forum.