Post by Project-Diddy on Aug 2, 2011 18:35:48 GMT -5
I can't say that this is my area of expertise, but I certainly have a few ideas as to how we might get a few more members.
INTRODUCTION:
When approaching the issue of increasing a forum's popularity, there seems to be two general ways of looking at it: marketing the forum, and membership uptake. Both are important in making a forum successful.
It seems a lot of focus is put on marketing the forum and attracting people to it. However, this thread is focussed, not on marketing, but on a slightly different (and arguably more fundamental) issue of actually enticing guests who find themselves on our site to actually register and join the community.
It is all well and good attracting people to the website, but if none of them decide to make accounts then all of these efforts have been in vain.
Hence, marketing focuses on getting guests to come to the site (maximising Guest:Member ratios), and the membership uptake focuses on getting guests to register and become members (minimising Guest:Member ratios). It is the latter this thread is concerned about.
STIMULUS:
The reason for focus on this aspect stems from a week ago, on July 25th, when you will notice that we had the largest number of users online ever: 27. I believe that 25 of these were guests; I was online at the time, and I think that Spe was as well (if my memory serves me well).
And yet, you will notice, none of these 25 guests actually registered. Arguably, 25 is not many in absolute terms, but relative to the number usually online on this board, it suddenly becomes a lot of people. So why have none of them joined?
The obvious reason would be that they did not find the board enticing enough to join. But why not? And what might we do to change this?
INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR SOLUTIONS:
My (albeit brief) brainstorm highlighted two central approaches to changing this.
1) The first is the simpler: activity. Guests like to see activity on the boards; there is no reason for them to join a board in which there are few posts. After all, there are about four or five active threads across the entire forum. To make this worse, they're spread about over different boards.
The initial obvious solution is to get more active threads. Whether that be through necroing old threads or creating new ones is immaterial - we simply need threads to be active and lively, even if they are off-topic; otherwise we risk guests feeling that the forum is far too inactive for them to bother joining, and more activity will entice more members who do join to remain active and keep posting on the forum. This will, hence, form a positive feedback loop, and become far less of a problem the more active members we get.
However, I would suggest a lot of focus on the General Board. I would posit that guests tend to look there first for an idea of activity, and the General Board tends to be a good indicator of the type of forum they're on. Hence, I would suggest more threads which are active on the General Board, even if they seem somewhat off-topic or random.
Plus, perhaps, I might argue for the movement of the Introduction Thread to the General Board also. New members and guests would both look in there first, and seeing an Intro Thread ready for them suggests that new members are accepted into the community. Moreover, if we keep this Intro Thread active, then it would give the idea to guests and new members that such new members are not only accepted, but welcomed! Of course, this may well mean that the thread will stray off-topic, but in the purpose of giving a welcoming feel to the forum, I think that's a small price to pay.
A counter to the above point of off-topic-ness within the Intro Thread would be that new members may feel uneasy to post in the thread, because a completely irrelevant discussion is going on, and they daren't disturb that in case they receive a hostile reaction. My response to this counter argument would be that, the nature of the conversation in that thread, and indeed across the entire forum, should show that we are a welcoming and kind community, and are not the sort to insult new-comers; this should dispel any fears they have about posting for the first time at all, but especially in an off-topic Intro Thread.
2) The second point is purpose, and the brief of the forum. If we're going to market the forum at all, we need a purpose to exploit and work from. It is this purpose that makes us unique as a board! It is this which makes it worth joining our community, and which distinguishes us from others. The current one I have little experience in, but my point isn't so much to do with this specific purpose but more that we simply need to exploit it and use it more, in general.
Especially as we look to -become- more active, I think we need to play up our purpose more so than we will need to in the future; after we have a larger, active community, the purpose doesn't have to be so avidly fulfilled constantly, and the community itself becomes a selling point, and most members have enough experience in the purposes to comment and appraise if one wished to make a "purposeful" (as in, pertaining to the specific purpose, not simply meaning contentful) contribution.
If we're struggling to get activity, or if few of our members can contribute to the purpose of the forum, it might be worth considering broadening the scope of the forum's "purposeful" discussions - say, to gaming appreciation, easter egg and glitch discovery, AMV creation, etc.
Alternatively, we could take a different stance and try to play up our position on the Liberty-Security scale as our unique selling point (ref: political philosophy lecture post, somewhere in the General Board). I certainly haven't seen a forum which is so Security oriented before, perhaps one could play on that a little. Of course, that might be easier (and perhaps more sensible to do) after we have a more active community present.
To summarise that point, what we need is a definite and realistic purpose to the board and brief as to what it will attempt to achieve, so we can exploit this within the marketing (maximising guest:member ratio) sections. More relevantly within this thread, however, is its application in the minimising guest:member ratio ideas - that we keep the areas of the forum pertaining to this purpose ACTIVE, so that guests which arrive expecting this forum to specialise in such areas are not disappointed.
DISCLAIMER:
These are initial ideas. Welcome to comments, criticisms, improvements, etc. Moreover, this thread is designed to be a brainstorming thread - pure forward new ideas, improve ones already suggested, and decide to implement any which seem to be perfected as far as plausible!
INTRODUCTION:
When approaching the issue of increasing a forum's popularity, there seems to be two general ways of looking at it: marketing the forum, and membership uptake. Both are important in making a forum successful.
It seems a lot of focus is put on marketing the forum and attracting people to it. However, this thread is focussed, not on marketing, but on a slightly different (and arguably more fundamental) issue of actually enticing guests who find themselves on our site to actually register and join the community.
It is all well and good attracting people to the website, but if none of them decide to make accounts then all of these efforts have been in vain.
Hence, marketing focuses on getting guests to come to the site (maximising Guest:Member ratios), and the membership uptake focuses on getting guests to register and become members (minimising Guest:Member ratios). It is the latter this thread is concerned about.
STIMULUS:
The reason for focus on this aspect stems from a week ago, on July 25th, when you will notice that we had the largest number of users online ever: 27. I believe that 25 of these were guests; I was online at the time, and I think that Spe was as well (if my memory serves me well).
And yet, you will notice, none of these 25 guests actually registered. Arguably, 25 is not many in absolute terms, but relative to the number usually online on this board, it suddenly becomes a lot of people. So why have none of them joined?
The obvious reason would be that they did not find the board enticing enough to join. But why not? And what might we do to change this?
INITIAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR SOLUTIONS:
My (albeit brief) brainstorm highlighted two central approaches to changing this.
1) The first is the simpler: activity. Guests like to see activity on the boards; there is no reason for them to join a board in which there are few posts. After all, there are about four or five active threads across the entire forum. To make this worse, they're spread about over different boards.
The initial obvious solution is to get more active threads. Whether that be through necroing old threads or creating new ones is immaterial - we simply need threads to be active and lively, even if they are off-topic; otherwise we risk guests feeling that the forum is far too inactive for them to bother joining, and more activity will entice more members who do join to remain active and keep posting on the forum. This will, hence, form a positive feedback loop, and become far less of a problem the more active members we get.
However, I would suggest a lot of focus on the General Board. I would posit that guests tend to look there first for an idea of activity, and the General Board tends to be a good indicator of the type of forum they're on. Hence, I would suggest more threads which are active on the General Board, even if they seem somewhat off-topic or random.
Plus, perhaps, I might argue for the movement of the Introduction Thread to the General Board also. New members and guests would both look in there first, and seeing an Intro Thread ready for them suggests that new members are accepted into the community. Moreover, if we keep this Intro Thread active, then it would give the idea to guests and new members that such new members are not only accepted, but welcomed! Of course, this may well mean that the thread will stray off-topic, but in the purpose of giving a welcoming feel to the forum, I think that's a small price to pay.
A counter to the above point of off-topic-ness within the Intro Thread would be that new members may feel uneasy to post in the thread, because a completely irrelevant discussion is going on, and they daren't disturb that in case they receive a hostile reaction. My response to this counter argument would be that, the nature of the conversation in that thread, and indeed across the entire forum, should show that we are a welcoming and kind community, and are not the sort to insult new-comers; this should dispel any fears they have about posting for the first time at all, but especially in an off-topic Intro Thread.
2) The second point is purpose, and the brief of the forum. If we're going to market the forum at all, we need a purpose to exploit and work from. It is this purpose that makes us unique as a board! It is this which makes it worth joining our community, and which distinguishes us from others. The current one I have little experience in, but my point isn't so much to do with this specific purpose but more that we simply need to exploit it and use it more, in general.
Especially as we look to -become- more active, I think we need to play up our purpose more so than we will need to in the future; after we have a larger, active community, the purpose doesn't have to be so avidly fulfilled constantly, and the community itself becomes a selling point, and most members have enough experience in the purposes to comment and appraise if one wished to make a "purposeful" (as in, pertaining to the specific purpose, not simply meaning contentful) contribution.
If we're struggling to get activity, or if few of our members can contribute to the purpose of the forum, it might be worth considering broadening the scope of the forum's "purposeful" discussions - say, to gaming appreciation, easter egg and glitch discovery, AMV creation, etc.
Alternatively, we could take a different stance and try to play up our position on the Liberty-Security scale as our unique selling point (ref: political philosophy lecture post, somewhere in the General Board). I certainly haven't seen a forum which is so Security oriented before, perhaps one could play on that a little. Of course, that might be easier (and perhaps more sensible to do) after we have a more active community present.
To summarise that point, what we need is a definite and realistic purpose to the board and brief as to what it will attempt to achieve, so we can exploit this within the marketing (maximising guest:member ratio) sections. More relevantly within this thread, however, is its application in the minimising guest:member ratio ideas - that we keep the areas of the forum pertaining to this purpose ACTIVE, so that guests which arrive expecting this forum to specialise in such areas are not disappointed.
DISCLAIMER:
These are initial ideas. Welcome to comments, criticisms, improvements, etc. Moreover, this thread is designed to be a brainstorming thread - pure forward new ideas, improve ones already suggested, and decide to implement any which seem to be perfected as far as plausible!