How can I keep a forum active?

[desbest]

How can you keep a forum active?

• Advertising
• Topsites
• Buttons
• Advertise on forums
• Comment on blogs
• Advertise on your sig

Any other ideas?

[etech-peter]

Here are some suggestions-

1. Make the layout of your forum attractive.
2. Add some fresh contents, news articles, contests and introduce a referral program.
3. The moderators should also start a new topics.
4. Advertise on relevant forums by posting your site's link on their webpage and ask their members to review your website.
5. Try link exchange with popular web hosting sites.
6. Send e-mails to your existing members who are not posting regularly and inform them about the start of new threads.

[Paul]

Also

- Not overloading your forum with mods and third party scripts and other related things like that
- keeping you forum well maintained
- not letting your members run circles around your admin and mods buy clearing breaking the rules and making the forum a nightmare of a place to be

and maybe just a pinch of common sense and being creative here and there has been known to help

[Keuzeserver]

Let staff not be to hard to your members, give the members a break sometimes, give them a change to do something wrong.
Just PM them the first time, you can warn him the next time. Or ban him.

[pawanrh]

Yeah! The Moderators and Admins must start the first few topics, depending on which more traffic will be drawn! Also They must keep the board active themselves coz its easier to reply than start a new topic and hence ppl always prefer just to reply!

[basem]

remeber this :
if your forum visitors didn't find what they want on your forum they wont even register

[Paul]

yeah thats right, gotta keep it interesting and fresh too.. no one wants "just another forum".

[desbest]

• Have a Forum Skin
• Quick Support
• Clear Rules and Hosting Plans
• Index Page of Hosting (not a forum index page)
• Links of partners to rep you up
• Events going on in the forum
• Be Realistic

[ezekiel97]

free stuff....keeps me posting

[wilo]

it's definitely gotta be interesting. The users need incentive to post. To that end it may mean content, elite/special exclusivity in terms of your area/subject, etc. It does not hurt to have a good moderation team and an appealing site. You don't want your forums constantly down, how does that make the user feel? Anyways I have yet to master this as the forums I run aren't extremely popular... yet