MESKOS Forum Development Blog

Don’t Let your Forum Die, Keep your Members Alive!

Don’t Let your Forum Die, Keep your Members Alive!

Keeping your members active, dedicated and interested is quite a challenging task in the long run. Administrators and the staff team will need to hold regular events to keep members interacting with each other and the forum.

Here are some ideas which you can take up to maintain activity within your forum.

1. Contests - Contests help bring back members and activity, depending on how successful it is managed etc. (Read my “Forum Contests, Forum Success?” Guide).
2. Forum Add-ons. Such as Money, Bank and shop Mods. Motivates members to post more for more forum credits. Remember! never to inflate your forum money value. Keep it controlled and managed.
3. Quality Content - A necessity for a forum to be successful is regular updates on new quality content.
4. In depth-Discussions - I have noticed, forums with a forum (or sub-forum) for debates increases the forum activity dramatically. How? because once a member joins a debate, he/she will be wanting to keep returning and enforce their point of views. So give this a try. But remember, keep this forum moderated, don’t allow excessive abuse or flaming.
5. Incentives - Incentives work extremely well for members to maintain their activity. One popular award for members who are active is the ‘Member Promotion’, promoting the member into a special or more elite group where they have additional profile features (more inbox space, custom team icon, different colouring etc). If you don’t have this in place, give it a try.

I hope these 5 points will help you keep your members alive and active.

© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008

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Tips on Maintaining a Successful Forum

Tips on Maintaining a Successful Forum
Maintaining a successful forum is difficult, but if you use the correct methods to satisfy your members and motivate them in regular contests, discussions etc. the job will not be as difficult. Here are some tips which i would recommend you put into action to motivate your members and maintaining the forum activity.

• Improve the registration rate and activity rate to eliminate any sense of inactivity. How? Invite friends and family to register and post once in a while.
• Give incentives to members who are active at your forum. Rewards may include: Free advertisement, a custom group, profile/account enhancement, etc. Depending on your forum genre, you can provide a service.
• Requirements, don’t hide all your resources from your members. Hide the “premium” resources from your regular members. Many admins make the wrong decision by making 25 post requirements for gfx requests, then another 10 posts to use these resources etc etc. This just encourages spam. I found that if you set one standard requirement to view all resources/access to services, it will improve the forum activity/less spam in general.
• Don’t act GOD! Many administrators close topics, abuse power and intimidate members, obviously this will cause disputes and loss of activity. Learn to acknowledge members input.
• Moderation - Not too strict, not too lose. Keep it moderate. But definitely remove spam no matter what.
• Offer interesting titles to users, forum awards and other offers to keep people posting in your forum.

I hope this article helps you in maintaining a successful forum. More tips will come soon in “Tips on Maintaining a Successful Forum Part 2″.

Written by
Michael. W
© MESKOS Forum Development Blog 2008
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