Well in the past few months the forum has taken a slight turn I did not agree with... I implemented a section where only a certain group of members could view and post, and they would vote other trusted members in... Well it seemed to create a kind of "elite" attitude with some of them... They felt the members who weren't apart of their little "clique" were "lesser" than they were, and their interests and posts were pretty much nuisances... They were also planning their own meets and things, excluding members on purpose... So I went ahead and made a move to remove that section of the forum in an attempt to bring everyone back together and show them they weren't any better than the other members... Well those members have since left the community and created their own site... Now normally I would not worry, its not the first time that one of the members decided to make another site... But what does worry me is that a large majority of my active posters have decided to leave the forum and go there (because they are all buddies in real life, and of course they would side with them)...

So I am left with maybe half of my active members... I do have a large amount of people who do not post (some lurk, many just signed up to sign up at my request)... So I can maybe try ways to get them posting to help counteract the damage of the active members leaving... But how do I get them to post?

As I said, this is a local community... So we do have meets and things at various parks and have BBQs, we actually have one coming up Feb 17th, and a few of the members who do not post will probably attend... Any ideas for incentives to get those members to post? I feel my biggest problem is that a lot of people just aren't familiar with forums or computers for that matter, and just do not know how to post and I feel the forum software confuses them... But how do I go about showing them that its not that hard to figure out?

Any help is appreciated!