Nothing bothers me more than an unpromoted forum. I don't mean paid advertisement, but just a hollow, empty forum with no/little users or posts, and the owner just expects it to sprout up and grow into a goldmine. What's up with that? I'm seeing it all the time, and what's more, people selling near-empty forums. This really makes me mad, thinking of how stupid people can be. Making a forum is hard work. It requires time and devotion by the owner. They need to make posts, be it talking to themselves or getting friends to reply. Either way, there has to be activity. Just a sort of mini-rant. I hate empty forums with default skin and the owner wonder's why no one's posting.
Thank you. You've just saved me a post. I'm staff at an admin website where I try and help out the members. But some of these people fail to understand that you can't create an excoboards forum in 5 minutes and hope to have 5 million posts in a day.
Are these the same people who come to your established forums and post "join my new forum, it's the best" while they have 2 members and 10 total posts?
lol... netmobius, I've seen that a few times... Been duped by a cathcy message that makes this other forum sound great, get there and there's only a few members and a scattering of posts. I'm starting a new forum right now actually, but you won't see my posting "come to my empty forum!" I've already got a few members and threads going anyways... I just took the first step by putting it in my sig... I thought even that was stretching it at this point, but since I have 15 members now I thought it was time, it's only been up for a few days now. I don't understand why other people make posts telling people to join their forum if they aren't even going to put some decent posts in it themselves...
It also pays off getting a paid forum posting service. It can jump start the forum in a way that could have taken up to a year to get to the same point. Yes it costs money but because of activity you can start collecting revenue sooner.
You're definately right there BryceW. You can also work out post exchange deals with other forum owners, but that does require just as much work and time depending on how you look at it.