members sign up every day but very few posts

Hello all, I have noticed that I have a lot of members, but very few posts, mostly it is folks selling "stuff" (I have another word for what they are selling) . I have tried to make a few interesting topic on the forum but nothing that seems to get any responses, yet people keep signing up every day

 

The members in your forum are not reliable to be active .
You must promote your forum with various method and try to make them active .

 

is human or bot sign up ??

 

May be its all bots!

 

Hmm I am not sure, how would I determine if it was a bot or human? I have that security thing where you have to ready some crazy letters before you register.

 

That crazy letter security thing is called Captcha. And that alone will not suffice for your forum. I have previously hired teams from certain parts of India, Pakistan & Bangladesh that work full time breaking Captchas (They see the image and enter the code manually) at a mass level.

Secondly, it is also possible that the vBulletin or phpBB or whatever board script you have use has a Decrypted Captcha. Which means that programmers have found ways to decode the image into letters.

Your best bet with boards would be Email Activation. I have personally found that email activation works wonders with bots. Ofcourse, they will not keep the human spammers away, but they sure will provide you much relief.

Enable Email Activation ASAP.

 

Thanks I will do that, now that I think about it as soon as I initiated Captchas.....registration went up. But what is the purpost of registering and not doing anything?

 

Email activation works pretty well, but I've noticed recently some bots sign-up and handle the e-mail activation process also. It's pretty easy if you have a good programmer available.

Strange, these seem to be signing up with all numeric characters in the username, most likely just a sequence number.

 

Well it helped, I am getting fewer registrations, and less garbage on the site.

 

well it only helped for a while, and I get about 50 junk posts a day. Do any of you request approval by the web master? It may be time consuming, but then again I spend time each day deleting crap, and banning users. I have the forum rules posted up front, and the topic that they are posting in states the posts will be deleted if it violates forum rules.

 

are you forcing users to register to view content ? If yes, then that could be reason for more users but no posts, users tend to register for a forum but never post as the content is visible to public

 

They're called spam bots when they want to sell stuff lol. You need to post some stuff yourself you know?

 

Have a read of this: vBulletin Spam

 

Thanks guys great info, I do require email notification so that helps a little. Yes indeed I do need to post more. The vBulletin Spam link is great, a lot of stuff on there I did not know. Back to work I go!