Gareth wrote:From the
lurkers thread ...
richie349 wrote:On any kind of forum, you'd expect to see new topics and discussions at least on a daily basis.
Based on my experience of running forums, ...
How many regular readers and frequent contributors are required to have a realistic expectation of new topics on a daily basis? Are the reader & contributor numbers here large enough for this to happen?
It depends what proportion of those people contribute. You need enough new posts each day to cause people to want to come back. How many daily visitors this requires clearly varies depending on your percentage of "lurkers" versus active contributors.
You need to be careful of focussing on "frequent contributors" though. Without sufficient active members to provide variation, you run the risk of it appearing like a small clique having conversations amongst themselves.
I suspect this site is close to the tipping point where it's still requiring active involvement from its owners and moderators to drive it forward and encourage people to join in. If you can get beyond that, a forum will become more self perpetuating and you'll find yourselves controlling the content and membership, rather than trying to encourage it.
The manually vetting process you use (an email from a moderator asking why you're signing up) is a very bad idea. it send a message to the prospective new member that the site is very quiet. Can you imagine a thriving, busy site being able to send individually written emails to each new subscriber?
hir wrote:richie349 wrote:On any kind of forum, you'd expect to see new topics and discussions at least on a daily basis.
Methinks it's a bit rich to be told this, without any hint of irony, by a self-proclaimed "lurker" who hasn't yet contributed anything meaningful.
It's not a bit rich for me to tell you this. I didn't jump in making uninvited criticisms; I responded to a query made by a regular member and offered constructive advice.
For what it's worth, I think ADUK's an excellent little site, that does pretty well considering the relatively small core of people behind it. I'd be happy to assist where I can to help improve its hit rate and therefore its level of activity.