Creating interest and return visits ... the extras

I just thought I'd throw this out and hear other admin's experiences. I realized early on that although forum providers tend to think of themselves as providing information about a topic to their users, what the users really want is to go on about themselves. They like polls and requests for their opinions. I believe they come back more often to see what others said about their opinions, more than to see the opinions of others.

Things that not only attract but attach them to the site is not the topic, it's playing with their own avatars, signatures and profile pages. Me-centered, my-image functionality. I know a lot of the 'bells & whistles' extras are things admins don't always enable because they don't want to provide the site storage and/or fool with moderating inappropriate content or maintaining size/space limits. But I promise that quite a few people will return sooner to tinker with the colors in their profile or upload a new avatar than they will to read more technical information. That leads to posting time on a visit they might otherwise not have made.

I'm sure there are some sites with members who don't care about that stuff. But if your site is dedicated to anything that is part of a user's public image to the part of the world they care about - cars, game characters, gardens - they would love to build a visual image for themselves as part of their forum experience. And show it off by posting.

It's been said - don't worry about what other people are thinking about you, because they're actually thinking about themselves.

Those're my thoughts.

 

Oh and ... making those extras visible to all but only available to those with paid memberships can encourage people to fork over for the paid privileges. Honest, there are people who will pay so they can customize their profile page when they won't to see more on-topic forums.