richie349 wrote:I must admit to being a regular lurker. I visit this site to have a quick glance over current forum topics. For what it's worth, I've always thought the topics seem to linger a bit and become stagnant. 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, ADUK would benefit from closing topics to new posts after a period of time. This would hopefully cause fresh content to be posted. Once an original post has a large number of responses, people are less inclined to sign in to add their bit as it will probably not get seen, and a previous conversation is likely to continue (rather liked being talked over in a face to face conversation).
It might also be worth considering adding a "guest" forum, where visitors to the site can make restricted contributions without actually registering first.
The latter is a risky strategy due to SPAM, but it could always be removed if the worst happened.
I'm now registered and logged in, so will do my best to be more active in future. Hopefully you find my suggestions worthy of consideration though.
Richie - I didn't respond as I'm not sure I agree and didn't want to taint the discussion with my own thoughts...but since no one else has responded, here goes...
Firstly, the idea of ADUK is not to get loads of traffic - we don't require funding from advertising etc...it's not that sort of forum. ADUK is a place for discussion of all things 'advanced' in hopefully a polite and considered environment. We occasionally get together face-to-face (as you know) and it's a convenient way of organising driving days.
I think if we closed topics, we'd get loads more repeat threads - which might make it disjointed. I daren't open a 'guest' forum - we get quite a few sign-ups each week from spammers but they are usually intercepted at the 'activation' stage...if we had an open forum I am sure it would quickly be overrun with spam and I am not prepared to spend the time endlessly deleting inappropriate posts and banning users.
There are 3 admins here - they may have different view of course.