Please review: HelpingWebmasters.com

[amelen]

Please review: http://www.HelpingWebmasters.com

It’s a webmaster forum that was originally the T35 Hosting Support & Development forum. It used to be very active a few years ago, but has died off recently. So we decided to spin it off into its own site and make it open to the public. Not too many of our moderators are posting on there yet but that’s mostly because we haven’t had too many users post. I need some feedback in terms of design, usability, what functions/features to add, and more importantly how to jump start the forum again.

Thanks!

 

[Mike]

Too stale, uneventful and generic.

Give your forum a few custom touches, custom logo/header/FavIcon and other visuals.
Then get a mass email out to the 4700 users and introduce them to an incentive to coming back and start to post again.

You have an amazing potential just sitting there - i'd "kill" to have 4700 registered users on my forum.

IB

 

[amelen]

Thanks for the feedback! Logo & FavIco are def. in the works.

We have tons of registered members, but not a lot of posts. It used to be very active.. and we are now listing the link to the forum on all new-signup-emails that go out to 400-500 new free hosting sign ups per day. The key is to get people to post though! A lot of the "questions" have moved over to the T35 help desk unfortunately. Any suggestions in terms of getting it going again? We just added a new contest (link in red at the top of the forum).. But it's not helping...

 

[Mike]

That's the question that if answered would also mean that someone discovered the holy grail of forum activity.

There are ways to promote/encourage people to post. Posting for prices is one of the ways. Play out an iPod or something of interest, between the first 10 users that reach a certain post count within a specified time frame. There are other "stipulations" included such as word count, meaningful posts, etc.

Unfortunately, i have not yet found a way on my own board to encourage posting or even registering for that matter. In my case, the "link to your own project" doesn't even work...

Bottom line; Other than throwing money at it, i have no clue how to reliably generate forum posts from users...

IB