Would it not be easier to put in your TOS that any poater which is inactive for say x number of months will be deleted rather than contact everyone, every time? As for offering help, I suggest a large "HELP" icon, though an email offering to help is a little more personal.

Marshall

I'm looking at my forum stats and see that approximately a half of people who created an account never made one post.

How many times have they visited the site? Just because they're not posting doesn't mean they're not visiting the site. Granted you need members who post to have a successful forum but my experience indicates there are typically far more lurkers than posters on forums. And anyway that's a topic for a different thread. :)

EDIT: A lot of your dormant members could be potential spammers who decided it's not worth it. This is another instance in which their total visits plays a part. I delete any account that's been dormant for a year unless the member has visited the site a certain amount of times. The number of visits indicates to me they're just taking a break which is not at all uncommon in my hobby niche.

I'm thinking about running a broadcast ... Do you think it's a bad idea to send such broadcast?

If you do send an e-mail to your dormant members frame it in a positive light. Don't make them feel guilty for not posting. Don't explain how easy it is to post. Instead find a way to motivate them to post and in the process perhaps give a brief explanation of how to post.

[edited by: GaryK at 6:28 am (utc) on July 27, 2007]

Would it not be easier to put in your TOS that any poater which is inactive for say x number of months will be deleted rather than contact everyone, every time?

It would certainly be easier, but what would that achieve?
I'm not trying to save DB space. I'm trying to get the inactive ones posting because I have a shortage of questions and plenty of people who are willing to answer. So I'm hoping that those who don't post now would bring in some fresh questions for the active members to answer.

How many times have they visited the site?

I can check that, but if you are a lurker and don't post because you don't know how, then maybe you just need directions. Also, some people might need a little push because there are a lot of users who are simply too shy to post. As I said, those are non-tech-savvy people.

A lot of your dormant members could be potential spammers who decided it's not worth it.

Not likely to be the case here. The members are not from search engine generated traffic. I think I'm getting like 5 referrals per day from search engines. So I'm not on any spammer's radar yet.

Granted you need members who post to have a successful forum but my experience indicates there are typically far more lurkers than posters on forums.

I got about 1,700 members 700 of whome are posting and 200 of which are really active posters. So the posting activity per se is not the problem. The community is growing and I have about 2,000 pages worth of content waiting to get picked up by the search engines. Once that happens, I'll have the inflow of more visitors some of whome would register. (that is if I don't end up in the supplemental hell for long).

My situation is reverse from other new forums. Usually, you would have people asking questions and no one answering them. What I have is a bunch of knowledgeable folks who are jumping on any question that is posted and answering it in minutes.

I don't really need those other members to post. The board has taken off the ground. But not trying to get more of the existing members to post is like not trying to make repeat sales with existing customers -- plain wasteful.

The point about lurkers that know how to post but choose not to is valid. I wouldn't want to upset or bother those people. I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out, if by sending a broadcast (or maybe a few), will I piss off or encourage more people.

Here are some stats for a few of top members:
#1 27 new topics, 1015 posts
#2 66 new topics, 675 posts
#3 24 new topics, 642 posts
#4 18 new topics, 604 posts
#5 24 new topics, 553 posts
...

The same can be seen with the top 50 or so members. They mostly answer other people's questions and don't create new topics themselves.

I can have 130 posts in a day and only 3 new topics created. Everyone just keeps discussing the existing topics.

I frequently see people in the "Who's Online" list that never post, my guess is they register for the notification options. It's the only reason I can think of.

As far as sending them an e-mail I'd avoid that because you may alienate some of them, I have a feedback/help forum where they can post questions. I also have a few stickies for the basics like a quick guide to posting with images.

I purge the memberlist every couple of months, my forum provides their last visit date. If they have no posts and haven't visited since they registered or shortly after I delete the account.

I also have a few stickies for the basics like a quick guide to posting with images.

I got a sticky not just with an explanation, but with the actual pictures of the buttons embedded in the text. Like "New Post", "Reply", etc. all images as they appear on the board controls.

Still, from time to time I get e-mail asking how to post.
I'm guessing for every one person that asked there were plenty that haven't.

Would it not be easier to put in your TOS that any poater which is inactive for say x number of months will be deleted rather than contact everyone, every time? As for offering help, I suggest a large "HELP" icon, though an email offering to help is a little more personal.

Marshall

Marshall's idea is the best way to handle the situation I think!

Some people freak out over any kind of email they didn't ask for and will flame you, report you to spam lists, etc.

As an alternative to emailing, consider encouraging members to post by a message in the forum that detects their lack of posting. vBulletin, for example, has a hack that provides different messages to guests, never posted, and no recent post members. These can include links to help screens, etc. along with a friendly message.

by a message in the forum that detects their lack of posting

Yep, I thought about adding a small popup in the bottom right corner that encourages people to post if it's a user with a registered account that hasn't made any posts. But with this, I'm missing out on those who registered but no longer visit the site because they've forgotten about it.

I got a sticky not just with an explanation, but with the actual pictures of the buttons embedded in the text. Like "New Post", "Reply", etc. all images as they appear on the board controls.

To be more specific I actually take that one step further. I'm using screenshots. The text diretions are numbereb and I have added the number with a arrow to the image. Basically if they can't post after viewing that they will never figure it out. :P

Yep, that's also on my to-do list. I want to create a set of screenshots for most basic use-cases, like registering, creating a new topic, and posting a reply.

> I'm missing out on those who registered but no longer visit the site because they've forgotten about it.

How do you know that they forgot about your site? Could there not be the possibility that some of those people decided they weren't interested in the forum, and so moved on? (And you can be sure that there's at least one of those freaked-out folk that rogerd spoke of in that crowd.)

Do you have to register to read the posts? I know I'm guilty of creating throw-away accounts on forums I'll never visit again. (Most annoying when you have to register just to see why you have an IBL from some forum...)

As for sending (multiple) emails... Put on your oven mitts, you're playing with some fire.

Consider this unfortunate scenario: Your website is on a shared host. Some other client of your provider makes a mass-mailing to their members (who have opted-in, but people being people...). One of those members uses AOL, forgets they had opted-in (or not, even), reports it as spam. AOL blacklists your host. Your mail to AOL no longer reaches its destination.

You can adjust the particulars in the scenario to fit your own situation. Say, not shared, but dedicated? There's still guilt by association (read: guilt by C Class)...

balam, I appreciate the warning, but those are the problems I know how to deal with.

I'm not worried about the technial issues and consequences of sending out a broadcast. I'm trying to see if someone here has done it before and what their experience was, mainly the benefits (or lack of) of doing it.

Have you tried seeding a few questions to encourage responses? Easy stuff, like what do you do or why are you here? You might ask this question in open forum? If you don't post, why did you come here?

I belong to mentors section of a large forum. They tried to weed out the non-posters. It turns out that the lurkers revolted and the plan was dropped, however postings are up.

I think it is a waste of your time to email your non-posters asking why they don't post. If you collected birthdays when they registered, send them a happy birthday message. That will be a nice gentle reminder.

HTH