Page 1 of 2

How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 1:11 pm
by vinvar
Firstly I would like to thank Phpbb and the entire community. All of you have been very helpful. I created a forum last year

http://www.myonestopforum.com

Currently I get around 20 people per day visiting the forum. Almost 100% via search engines. I want to take the forum to the next step. So would like to have a few thoughts. Please bear with me if they are 'stupid' questions as I am just starting out. My main question is how do I get users to be active on the forum. Currently what is happening is that users just come on the forum from a search engine, they look at the content and then disappear. I would like them to register, to post and to participate on the forum. As you can see from the forum, I have tried to offer gift cards, but the campaign has failed so far. I have the traffic coming to my page and I am confident of getting more traffic in the future. Plan to double it in a few months and that is achievable. But not sure how i can get others to post/participate.

The other thought I would like to have is how do I secure the forum so that people don't wander off trying to copy content or hacking my website.

Any other advice to a fellow phpbb forum member would be really really appreciated. I am just beginning out so don't know what to do next since I am getting quite a bit of traffic now.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2014 1:22 pm
by KevC
It looks like you're trying to do board for everything. They never (or at least rarely) work. People visit boards to chat to others on a specialist subject that they like. With no single subject it's very hard to attract users.

You seem to have most of your posts on the computing stuff at the top. Maybe it's time to think about making that the main subject of the board.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2014 1:00 pm
by vinvar
Sir,

Thanks for your input. I agree. Some of the boards need to go. I will be removing them. Anything else that you may suggest to do in terms of securing the site or marketing or anything. Thanks for your inputs.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2014 1:13 pm
by KevC
This topic is worth reading
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=362219

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2014 2:21 pm
vinvar wrote:Sir,

Thanks for your input. I agree. Some of the boards need to go. I will be removing them. Anything else that you may suggest to do in terms of securing the site or marketing or anything. Thanks for your inputs.
A custom logo may not be a bad idea. It will distinguish yourself from the rest of the "little edited" phpbb themes.

I will say the site does look a little bit sketchy, but I have not looked deeper into it yet.

Best,
JB

-----------------

Ok, I have done a bit more snooping,

#1, you gift card system does not make sense.
a. Earn a $1 Gift Card of your choice just for registering on this site and posting 5 topics.(This is to prove to everyone that we will reward you and that we are not just talking)
b. Earn a $5 Gift Card of your choice for every 100 posts. $10 bonus gift card once you reach 1000 posts.
Since your gift card to post ratio is 1/5 for a, and 1/20 for b, I don't see why anyone would ever post more than 5 posts, they would just create a new account... Users may not feel connected to the site.

Additionally, There are a few spelling errors throughout the site, so I would recehck.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2014 9:43 pm
by Oyabun1
Not a "support" issue so moved to General Discussion.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2014 9:52 pm
by KevC
Also either your user count is faked or you've had a lot of spam accounts that you've left in. You have a disproportionate number of posts per user. Basically you and a friend have posted almost every topic and the other users haven't posted anything.

One reason for that is that the 300 or so topics that you and your friend have done are not discussion topics. You've basically googled some 'facts and procedures' and posted them. That doesn't generate any discussion. There's nothing for people to talk about when it's just a topic with a set of steps or some information about a linux procedure in it. They're basically static web pages put in to a post.

If you want people to chat you need to give them something to chat about.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2014 2:56 am
by vinvar
Well firstly thanks to everybody for providing their input. It really means a lot is one of the reasons why phpbb is above the others. Regarding the high number of user accounts. Yes 90% of them are spam accounts that were created by spammers. I have been able to stop the spam account creation by putting in a stronger user creation Q-A.

Secondly, yes, you are correct. There are 5-6 genuine members(founders) who are posting content. The content is not googled around, it's original content and that is why the google ranking of our pages is quite high and we get decent traffic. What is the content? It is quite simple. We are IT professionals and want to help out others. To do so we document all the issue we face day to day in life(technical) and we post it. This is quite time consuming, but we are doing so. We want to encourage others to do the same, but it's not happening.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 9:04 am
by AmigoJack
vinvar wrote:We are IT professionals
That collides with the technical and lingual quality of the posts - either you want to be professionals (still having a long way to go), or this is really your best (and you're performing poorly). A few examples:
  1. Improper brands: MySql instead of MySQL, Phpbb instead of phpBB, JAVA instead of Java. If you can't even treat the technology name right I most supposely stop reading.
  2. Phpbb does not search within code tags - that's no solution, it's a workaround and bound to several requirements.
  3. How do I add a blank line in HTML - that will create a line break, not necessarily a complete line. On top that syntax is wrong, as void elements must not have end tags.
While your board might be a place to start at, it is definitly not providing professional help.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:41 am
by vBBANKs
so how does phpbb get typed out?
phpBB or Phpbb

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 11:56 am
by KevC
Just scroll to the top and look at the logo.
phpBB

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:24 pm
by vBBANKs
Yea that's how i always use it . was just looking at what that dude AmigoJack said so i didn't know what to think
Thanks for clearing it up for me

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2014 3:46 pm
by Holger
Forums covering everything on earth will never get running properly.
There are too many of them out there and there is no expertise for anything in them.
Look for a niche (where you self are good) and start posting interesting stuff (by yourself!). Information, information, information, always up-to-date, and more information. And then some more information. Different information and up-to-date information. This is the only way to attract searchengines and to get the users to stay and to interact.

Quality!
Do you want quality posts or many posts? Or both? The later cannot be achieved in a short period of time!

Be patient!
My board was started 10 years ago and it took far more then 5 years to get it running by "itself". Now we have over half a million posts (approx 10,000 per month) and new posts are indexed by Google within minutes (seconds?).
Now it is running by itself and is generating income that we can re-use for programming, servers, security and more.

Running a board is expensive!
You cannot run a large/successful board on a freehoster or shared hosting (maybe if it is not modified at all).
Currently we are using redundant high end servers.
We moved from freehosters, to one.com (a good startingpoint btw), to different shared hosting providers and then to own servers.
We also looked into Amazon Cloud scalable services but that has to wait.

The board has to be up and fast! All the time!
There is nothing more frustrating then visiting a board that is down or slow!
You will loose users massively if the board is down or slow!

Try to create a network of domains.
I have registered 20 or more domains within the board-subject and they are showing parts of the topics (topic_anywhere), drawing the searchengines and users to the board.

And maybe the second most important after "information":
Listen to your users!
Try to meet theire demands in terms of functionality, quickly.
We are maintaining a huge download-area, knowledgebase, easy multi-image-upload and so on.
This also requires money. At some stage you wont be able to program/mod things by yourself anymore, keeping the security on a high level.

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Thu May 15, 2014 9:54 am
by Anuj Dhawan
vBBANKs wrote:Yea that's how i always use it . was just looking at what that dude AmigoJack said so i didn't know what to think
Thanks for clearing it up for me
Unless 'am mistaken -- AmigoJack has got it correct:
AmigoJack wrote:Phpbb instead of phpBB
- what are you referring to? :?

Re: How do I get people to be active on a phpbb forum

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 4:40 pm
by muonline
Holger wrote: Now it is running by itself and is generating income that we can re-use for programming, servers, security and more.
So you dont earn by yourself? Everythings that you earn goes to the spend for site maintain?