I'm running a small community board with about 250 registered users and I'm not sure if the activity of my users is average or if the board is in need of improvement. With other words: are there just too few people yet or don't they post more because something doesn't feel right on the boards. I'm not sure if I shouId invest more time into promoting the board or change something else.<br /><br />So, just to have a comparison: what kind of ratio between registered users and active posters do you experience? How big are the userbases on your boards on average?<br /><br />Any suggestions on increasing user activity? I have tried to "seed" discussions to get them going together with the other admin but now we have the feeling that people "don't dare to post" because there are so many postings from us admins =:-)<br /><br />Thank you for any feedback.<br /><br /><br />bye, tina

Hi Tina,<br /><br />I'd ask your users what they want. Why guess when you can go to the source? []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]<br /><br />Good luck to you,<br /><br />Bridgette<br /><br />

Greetings Tina!<br /><br />Bridgette makes an important point. It helps a good deal to have feedback mechanisms. Sometimes polls and such draw out lurkers sometimes they do not.<br /><br />I'm rushing and just came in for a fast lurk around but cannot resist this sort of post :)<br /><br />Lurker/poster ratio: Yours is normal. Ratio Varies with sort of forum etc..but YEs it is usually outrageously high. A good thing to remember..your postings are read by more folks NOT conversing with you on the boards than those who post. Posters opiniones may or may not represent your constituency!<br /><br /> Is 250 large enough?<br /><br />That answer depends on your goals. But for an active web board as ageneral rul;e I'd say a strong board require no less than 25 regular regulars and 50 who check in frequently. Obviously larger more active boards require much much more..but these numbers are adequate in my experience for a sense of actiuvity, diversity and excitment. Whether you need to grow beyond this depends on Your Goals...<br />For adverstising revenue, For global evangelization *grin--kidding* etc..<br /><br />Frauenweb is beautifuly designed with a good user interface. To really answer you I need to sign in and take a look..<br /><br />"Too many admin posts may or may not be a problem...content actually matters here. A good idea is to have admins post with normal name and status initially so their admin status is not immediately apparent to the world.<br /><br />And of course how welcoming the posts are and whether the sort of conversations begun will be of interest to the readers and pull them in all matters a good deal<br /><br />A fast initial look I would ask this:<br />1. Your main admin protest seems to be the oNLY poster and while my German is rusty it seems mosts posts are REPORTS of womens activities and protests?<br /><br />If so I would suspect the readers are simply using your boards to read about these...:)<br /><br />Yet the site has so much diverse information for and by women... If I were creating these boards I would want places for women to meet eachother and offer introductions (people love totalk about themselves or watch those who do)<br />Chat with eachother, share opinions etc...<br />Talk about the myths mentioned inthe psychology article , relate it to their lives... To do this they must be invited and some others need to be doing it.<br /><br />I did not spend time struggling with the German or reading carefully..But my imnpressed was that the boards bombarded with information rather than welcomed conversation. Perhaps if I had more time and read the German (UGHHHH mine is awful--though I can struggle through with dictionary) I would have a different impression<br />But given the best I can do for now I'd say<br /><br />Yes there may well be TOO much content and information on your boards in that it might be more CONTENT giving than conversation urging sort of stuff<br /><br /><br />Hope this helps<br /><br />Renee<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]<br />renee@oracleweb.net

Hi Bridgette!<br /><br />Well, I was thinking that in case the activity is normal and we are just too few users I would just make people unnecessarily feel bad by asking them "why don't you post more?".<br /><br />The question would suggest that something is wrong while everything might be perfectly normal so I wanted some other experiences first.<br /><br />bye, tina

Hallo Renee!<br /><br />Hmm... still wish there was an ability to quote text...<br /><br />Firstly, thank you very much for your feedback on frauenweb! What you have seen so far are only the 3 open-to-all boards. There are 23 women-only boards which are like what you suggested - places for discussion on mostly feminist topics, but also stuff like sports & fitness or jobs, etc... What we do is we check the identity of users by phone call before we give them access to these boards. Which are therefore a very sheltered place - this is why I thought people would be more active in the first place.<br /><br />You are right the "gegenschwarzblau" forum is a not really a discussion forum but an information forum - this was added only recently to help spread information about the current political situation in Austria. The only "discussion" posts we had there were from anonymous posters who were threatening us(!) - which is why there is the "protest" account the password of which is known to everybody with access to the women-only forums so everybody can post information without having to give their real login name and still make the post more "official looking" than just posting as anonymous.<br /><br /><br />So, I'm still curious - how big are the average userbases and lurker/active ratios?<br /><br />Eg. in our most active forum there were (since 1.1.2000):<br />68 posts by us 2 admins, 40 posts by 8 other users<br />31 threads started by admins, 6 by users<br /><br />out of a total of 115 users who have a high enough level to access the women-only boards.<br /><br />bye, tina

Tina,<br /><br />I guess a lot depends in the traffic that your site drives too. How many pageviews your site has? Maybe I am being egoist here, because I am also trying to figure out how much postings I could get to my site that for now has about 400 pageviews per day (more or less). Anyway, I am just trying this message board to put it in my new site.<br />Anyway, to answer your question… Although I don’t have much experience w/ message boards (my only and old message board is http://members.aol.com/Carlos1997/Forms/msg.htm ), I think that what drives participation is the nature of the topic. Usually, controversial topics draw more traffic, and I am telling you this as a user, not as a webmaster. This is because I have rarely participated in other messages boards besides the one in my site. But I did once when the topic was really heated: Immigration. Maybe because I have strong feelings about it. Of course, the topic has to go in accordance w/ the central topic of your site. My site is, for instance, a new portal about Peru. So if I talk about Peruvian soccer, I am sure I will have lots of visitors, at least, and of course, like you I will also hope to have lots of participation too. This is just a hypothesis at this time, since I have not completely tryout yet, but I have faith it will work….<br /><br /><br />

Greetings Carlos!<br /><br />And good luck with your new community! What is soccer?<br /><br />Just kidding ;-)<br /><br />There are many attempting to figure out ways to measure web communities economic value and rules that can be applied to insure success. Many doing web community development really want this to satisfy investors. I tend to prefer the truth myself Here it is:<br />There is no standard ratio between pageviews or registered users and forum activity. Far too many factors go into community success and even the number of posts is not determinative.<br /><br />What has been established is:<br />1. Online Communities which are an online version of an already existing real community are the surest bet<br /><br />2. Moderated communities do substantiually better in providing value by just about any measure trhan unmoderated ones<br /><br />3. Most participants are and will always be lurkers. Forums that respect their lurking members do better than those that ignore them ..or push their participation through posting<br /><br />4. Good Site Navigation and Design, Quality Content in addition to forum, regular mailings and updates to members, a system for welcoming all who sign up and assigning a person to welcome them personally...are a few of many things a good community does to retain folks and grow.<br /><br />And I do know Soccer ..football is another story I see it but can't figure out the joy of guys clobbering one another. Soccer seems more...errr..sporting to me !<br /><br /><br /><br />Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]<br />renee@oracleweb.net

And the "Ladies" have been playing a good game. They have a saying here in the States "Men play Soccer but the Ladies bring home the World Cup".<br /><br />[:red]D</font color=red>[:orange]a</font color=orange>[:blue]v</font color=blue>[:green]e</font color=green>[:purple]A</font color=purple>

Our ladies soccer players took their clothes off and put out a calendar. All they brought home was more male fans...[]/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]<br /><br />Darren.<br /><A HREF="http://www.bullpen.com.au" target="_new">http://www.bullpen.com.au</A>

Rlevant,<br /><br />Thanks for your comments. I am trying to contact the main programmers of wwwthreads to install it to my Web site w/ some minor mods. I hope to find a good audience. I got a couple of hundred people that signed in my email list that hopelly will help me to get that message board going after it is set up. <br />Regarding soccer… you are right, the US female team is the best!!! Too bad we can’t say the say the same about the men’s team L<br />And tina sorry I couldn’t really make any specific comment about your site. I don’t speak or read German, and using those translation sites is really tough…<br /><br /><br />

Can somebody explain me how come I am a "stranger" ? I didn't se how to change that to my profile...or do I need to have a few hundred posts to be promoted to "member" or something like that?<br /><br />

Carlos! The stranger amongst is is the most important person!<br /><br />and yes you loose that status when you have open the mouth a whole bunch.<br />Mind you the titles do notrate the quality of our postings only the number ;-)<br /><br />Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]<br />renee@oracleweb.net

Now Dave, in applying your story to increasing activity in your web community let me make a few points .<br /><br />First: Many sports sites are family oriented. Indeed a web enabled calendar of the type you mention may result in the lose of memberships for such a site.<br /><br />Second; however if you do adult site sort of things (the ex nun in me still has an attitude not helpful to capital gain on this) this could indeed be an interstig approach. That is a Adult Sports site may well be a nitch yet to be filled ;-)<br /><br />:)<br /><br />Renee Levant [b]Oracle Web Services[b]<br />renee@oracleweb.net

This gave me lots of thought about my future message board, rlevant, I am going to do some search in this bulleting to see if I can change the titles when I buy the scripts (stranger, enthusiastic, etc.) to others ones in Spanish. The only problem is that in Spanish, the sex gender applies in many cases, so I might have to put extraño/a, for example…. which doesn’t looks right… Actually many in my audience is bilingual too, so I might leave the titles in English.<br />What you say about the quality of the postings is also true. Titles might encourage more participation, but they not necessarily help to improve the quality of the postings. However, this also depends in the type of content of the site too. If it’s a philosophical Web site, the people might have long posts. On the other hand, and "Adult" Sports site might not be very philosophical he he he but more graphical. <br />I think that would be an interesting "niche" to be considered. It might also explain why the sites of Anna Kournikova fans are not frequented by tennis fans either, but for just regular man who admire her more for her physical attributes. I always thought that a portal of home pages of regular beautiful women, or men, would also be a good niche. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or resources to make more sites….<br /><br /><br />

One way I've found to increase the activity of your forum is to participate in it--and like mad! The more posts you reply to, and the more threads you start the more activity you'll get.<br /><br />As far as userbase size goes, I have a small Miva-based forum with only about 14 active users (including myself) and it routinely gets around 5000 messages per month, while another of my forums that I don't post in much flounders with around 1000 registered users.<br /><br />So the moral of the story is: 'Post Post Post'!! []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]<br /><br />Socrates<br />ForumExperts

I have to agree. The worst thing you can do is post a message, such as "Is this place dead?" or "why doesn't anyone ever post?" All this does is make the person press the "Home" button and try again at a different site.<br /><br />I agree, the more you post, about different topics, the more the users can read, and sooner or later, you'll hit something that someone will resond too...<br /><br />

An admin post à la "what do you think about that" will not work in a rather inactive community. It's not that bad like "why is this board dead", but all you'll get are some replies like "yes, you're right" or "no, I don't think so".<br /><br />This may sound a bit fishy, but in fact it is a good way to create real topics on your board.<br /><br />Of course you can't apply every "rule" to all communities, but the basic community dynamics are the same in most cases.<br /><br />People will post more if they are upset about something, therfore, if you check the boards of all major software companies you will find tons of people complaing about their products. This of course is mostly because of very bad community management. But it gives a small insight into community psychology. You don't want them to get upset about you, it will create a bit more traffic on your board but it will come back to you very soon as the community will fall apart.<br /><br />One of the best methods is creating a controversional topic that will splitt your community into two or more groups.<br /><br />You may go "undercover" and post some rather provocative messages. Keep it relevant to the topic though, the last thing you want to do is starting a rant-thread or a flame war on your own board.<br /><br />

CarlosC asked:<br />Can somebody explain me how come I am a "stranger"<br /><br />I say:<br />This is a relevant question in this thread.<br /><br />Part of this thread talks about the poster-to-lurker ratio, correctly pointing out that most people come to sites mainly to read. So is it appropriate to call a first-time poster a stranger? Will it build community, make them feel welcome, etc.?<br /><br />For that matter branding read-only users as "lurkers" doesn't help, nor does it help to brand them newbies or strangers when they first pipe up.<br /><br />As a fairly humorless sysop I edited the user titles to "less than 25, less than 50, etc."<br /><br />The Motley Fool site uses small icons instead -- one, two or three small stars, then a big gold star after your thousandth(!) post.<br /><br />Hmm. I wonder if w3t will let me replace the text descriptions with image tags...<br /> -- David Innes<br /><br />

I feel that if you run a small but active forum you can even decide to hand edit the titles for each member.<br /><br />I am doing that because I know people appreciate that little bit of extra attention. It also erases the need for post-count raising. <br /><br />Large sites like http://boards.stratics.com can never do this as 50K users is way to much. But changing the standard titles, maybe even expanding them will give a greater commitment to the posters. (although excesses like 1K spamposts in 1 day exist).<br /><br />Fot the small board setup I am running I can afford to spent the time to give every user a hand picked title. Furthermore all standard titles are adapted to the community (a virtual town in a fantasy setting).<br /><br />Visibility of the moderators and administrators as "normal" posters also increase feel of community rather then of customer and supplier.<br /><br />I noticed a lot of lurkers "decloaking" once they saw the atmosphere on the boards where cool and loose and above all safe. Moderators are the key to ensure this. <br /><br /><br /><br />

This is an old post, but I'd like to share mine.<br />I'm maintaining a site which is a very specific site, talking about cellular phones.<br /><br />At first Jan 01, we had an average per day:<br />4,000 hits, 80 visitors, few members, 1,000 page views, 50MB trafics, 6 posts.<br /><br />10 months later, we had an average per day:<br />100,000 hits, 1,500 visitors, 1,400 members, 11,000 page views, 600MB traffics, 250 posts.<br /><br />In August, there was a major new feature added. It was developed by the community itself.<br /><br />By graphs, I did the right thing because the stats says it moves up.<br /><br />Here is what I have done so far:<br />1. Open the board for free, after you get the community going on in that board, (few posts per day, you can feel it whether the community has started or not) close the board only member can post, then if the community continues to grow fast, you can even make the board only to members can read.<br /><br />2. Put the actual "recommend us" form in every page.<br /><br />3. Use Banner exchange<br /><br />4. Always give a link to your site in your signature. Especially when you forward things. (many people forward jokes, etc why don;t you send him/her a mail joke with your signature on it? he/she will forward it to their friends)<br /><br />5. Want to have loyal visitors? You must make them feel that you will fight for them. Be a leader.<br /><br />6. Send out monthly news letter.<br /><br />7. Do not put, "you are visitors: xxx", or show your statistic to a public when you are weakness in that part.<br /><br />8. Always innovate things. How to do this? Be Specific. Always go with your plan, and goal of your website. Be specific.<br /><br />9. Don;t make another board if it is not necessary. It shows them how quiet your forum is.<br /><br />10. Whenever you see Links for all or guestbook somewhere, sign it.<br /><br />Well, I hope my points can help someone... []http://www.threadsdev.com/threads/php/images/icons/smile.gif[/]<br /><br />Btw, use Wwwthreads/Ubbthreads, since it is so powerful and fast []http://www.threadsdev.com/threads/php/images/icons/smile.gif[/]<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />