Hello, This may be me being a bit paranoid, but do you find that there are a lot of users who sign up but do not post? I have about 50 users of which about half have never post, and never return. Is this usual? Thanks
Yes I suppose it is. Some times people just register to add an profile with an link in, or some register and forget to login and forget about the whole forum. Some cannot get the activation email, and cannot contact you or cannot be bothered to contact you.
Or they just don't post because there is no activity. You have to create the activity so that other users can reply to posts. If they can't find anything interesting for them, they'll just leave.
If guests are unable to read posts, or even stricter rules are in place, then this is normal. If they ARE able to read posts, then check the zero post users and check roughly how many are inserting a www address in their profile. If that's the case, then it's likely spambots, though these can be disabled with a simple mod (see third link in my sig).
Well this is absolutely normal.FOr example a 20 000 member forum has only 8 000 active members on average
could be people who initially like the look of your forum yet when they look a bit deeper there's not much activity. write some controversial posts in various subforums. And put questions in, like "new subaru impreza? ugly - what's your view" - although you might get a few subaru fanboys having a pop, but that's what you want - interactivity. You just need to get things going. some stuff like that and see what happens.
Or there could be bots registering... Nobody knows. I, personally, get a lot of registered people on my site but they never come back. Some of them are writing "www.email@domain.tld" so it's impossible for them to activate their account.
Have you ever thought of introducing a premium members area where users get different sorts of privileges? Try it. But make sure you ask them to make 50 posts or something like that in order to join it. This will attract their attention, I guess.
Could be spammers they wait like a day. I can tell a spammer by his username P.S Cool site man, wish I still skated, tore my ankle doing a bio 540 over a funbox hip on a rainy day... Either way cool site and with topsides you gotta push your ankle in. I always found topside acid or alleyoop topside acid to be fun. Switch sweatstances were also a personal favourite
best way is just to send a emailer with some offer of freebies or either some interesting stuff related to the topic of the forum, im facing the same issue on my board too, and im about to send one emailer. though i would do it very rare, one email in about 3-6 months.
I guess it is normal behavior. DP has 73110 members and 26926 active members. Out of these 26926 active ones, a big portion hardly posts anything. All forums have similar trends.
It all depends, but a lot of us forum owners have the same problem. They're what we'd like to call it lurkers, they may read the posts, but not post, or just come to the site just to visit and leave. I'm not sure why is this, and I'm pretty sure if you just continue working on your forum (adding new content), then you shouldn't worry about the users that come and don't post.
In my opinion,initially people enjoy posting on a forum.Now, as days pass by, they may find that there are hardly any members who are interacting to their post.Also some of them get busy with other forum job posting work and as a result of which lose grip on the previous posting assignment jobs that they had taken up.
several possible reasons: - registering to get a backlink via their signatures - registering to view the posts (if necessary) and finding nothing interesting to post about - will be posting later - spam bots that will return later (seen it happening in mine)
You can always delete the members, that havn't posted after a period of time. I don't delete members at all, I even leave the spam members.
I have my forum where users register and once I mass mailed when I got 1k members, now some users contact me asking their usernames...
Thats an sort of good idea, depends if you know if they are spam users or bots though. If you deleted the bots first then emailed the remaining after that could work.
Check their e-mails, if they have suspicious looking e-mails then they're probably spam bots, and you can just delete them. And if their a real member, as someone else said, send a newsletter with something interesting, and they might return.