UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Promoting Your Community I feel like I'm being used for my Photo Gallery

Seriously. No one really goes to my site still to post messages and I had about 80 members (very few active). Now I've had about 30 sign up in the week since I made it so you can't see photos unless you're logged in, i.e. registered (there are over 500 already). I've even turned on User Validation, so that bots are less likely to sign up. So people are validating, but I'm not seeing a real increase in posts (One new post to be exact).

Now I am seeking advice. How can I get these new users to post in the forums? Unless there is a huge surge of bots crawling my site, I can thank PhotoPost for my new members. But I do want some participation, either in the gallery or better yet, in the forums. What could be the potential reactions to me using Gardeners auto-group change mod to make it so you have to be in a certain user group to see these photos, which would be attained by making X number of posts? Maybe 5 or 10 posts. What do you think?

You know, when I was a junior in high school I bought a red mitsubishi 3000 GT with some insurance money I had from breaking my jaw and getting all jacked up in a car accident.

Anyway, my mom used to say, "I don't know why you pick up all those girls, they only want you for your car."(sooo not true, but I digress)

I told her, "Mom, that's okay, I only want them for their body"

I think that this same principle would apply. Who cares if they are only posting photos. They signed up, and that's what you want. As long as the photo section gets them there, then you should consider that an effective marketing tool. If you didn't have it, then they might not sign up or revisit at all. Now that you've got them there, you'll have to find a way to get them posting. I would imagine that they'll eventually post anyway, but if that's not the case, I'm sure others on here have plenty of suggestions.

Reviewpost looks to me like it will be the MAIN attraction to my site once it gets full of information and reveiws. As soon as it gets really huge, I'll probably require users to register in order to access them. And they won't be able to see the actual user reviews (the comments part) until they have made X number of posts. That will get them posting hopefully.

I'm also using an integrated install of UBBT and Photopost. To save on bandwidth, I won't allow unregistered users to see anything but thumbnails in the photo gallery. This seems to weed out the drive-by curiousity seekers from the people who are really interested and willing to take the time to sign up. Then, when users do sign up, I automatically put them in a "Probation" group which only allows them to view photos, and to post in certain forums on the message board. They can't upload photos, or post in the "more coveted" forums, until they've written 5 posts on the message board. I explain this in the "Welcome" private message, although I don't tell them specifically how many posts they need to write before their usergroup will change. I simply say they need to "participate and contribute to the community" and then they'll be allowed all privileges. I use the "auto group change mod" to faciliate this.

This configuration has been very successful. I've got about 4300 registered users, and I would guess that at least half of them have posted enough to get themselves out of Probation. In the Welcome PM, I direct new users to a "Getting to Know You" thread, and tell them to introduce themselves -- this gives them a place to start and an easy topic to write about. They usually do this sort of tentatively, but I have a number of moderators on the board who make a point of responding positively to every new poster. That seems to help new members feel welcome, and they feel more confident about posting.

I didn't start out running my site this way. However, my members are largely teenage girls, and I found they were just using the Photo Gallery as their personal photo album and ignoring the rest of the website (it's the official website of a "celebrity"). By limiting their access to the photo gallery and to the thread where they can actually exchange posts with the celebrity, I gave them lots of incentive to become contributors to the board. It's made for a really nice, friendly community.