How come this seems to happen on my own forum?

It either gets tons of people registering per day and hardly any posts, or tons of people posting and hardly any registration. It's annoying, although I'm also wondering; is there any way to get more members quickly? I've seen sites with about ten times the members but half the post count or less and I'm wondering how some of these sites get like 20 members a day with far less activity (granted, some have been running for less time) post wise.

Any ideas?

 

If you see alot of members and little posts, then I'd be inclined to believe it to be bots.

 

Why not believe in yourself and just post more content to encourage posting?

Bots it's pretty much saying "cbf with typing so I make this plugin do it for me"

 

Be proactive. Contribute fresh content. Encourage your community.

Those above methods have always proven to be effective for me. It'd be easier to pinpoint the exact cause of this phenomenon if there were a set pattern to conclude this from, but the number of new registrations versus the number of posts made on a daily basis always tends to vary greatly. Being proactive and contributing "fresh" (new) content to your community is probably your best bet - this will in turn encourage your members to participate actively and discuss the subject matter more effectively.

 

Thanks to everyone who's answered... but that's the thing... I'm running out of possible content to post. It's not the best day in the world for the Nintendo news front, if many blogs are to believed. And I'm already posting nigh on every piece of news, interesting fan production and music remix I can find.

 

I know the feeling. On days when I get higher than average ligit registrations I seem to get lower than average posts and vice versa. I even tracked it for a time to see if it was an illusion or not.

Whats even more frustrating is activity levels. Activity breeds activity so when the day starts out with few posts it tends to stay that way all day. Yesterday was a just down right horrid day. The few posts were of good quality and the visit count was there just no one was responding. Then I looked at a few other sites and noticed that yesterday was just a slow internet day it seems. Being it was a Jewish holiday and a nice day in many parts of the US I'm going to figure that a lot of folks just took a day away from the net...

 

The bolded is the biggest problem with internet forums ever. And what makes getting a site back out of a depression akin to the most ridiculously difficult slog ever possible. Not to mention that sometimes you've just got to wonder why people just don't respond to anything for no real reason.

There is another potentially annoying problem though I've found when running a forum... I'm not in the USA. With many forum users being from the same country (again, not particularly the US, just an example), if you're stuck living somewhere different from three quarters of the forum user base, it makes management almost hell.

 

Creating activity by posting quality content has it's own pitfalls. If a forum owner posts to much that tends to turn off the members and one finds themselves posting a lot with no followup discussion. On my own site my posts constitute 9.1% of all posts with the next highest coming in at 3.7%. I'm looking to keep up and even grow the level of activity on the site while reducing my own percentage of the total. One thing I find that helps is controversy. However, that is a double edged sword. One does get increased activity but it needs a greater level of moderation to make sure it does not get out of hand.

 

I was meaning, when you see a big member count on a forum, but hardly any posts, it is probably spam/registration bots, which we all have to deal with. :shrug:

 

In my opinion, you shouldn't worry about the amount of members you forum has, but rather the amount of posts it has and how many posts it's getting daily. Work on getting the posts up by adding fresh new topics and content daily, and you'll see members coming in.

Good luck.

 

I respectfully disagree.

Citing "90-9-1" Rule for Participation Inequality: Lurkers vs. Contributors in Internet Communities (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) it takes 10 users to get one that is highly active. In reality it often seems that even this figure is to high. In effect we are playing a numbers game. In order to reach that critical mass where there are enough posts to keep people coming back we need a large number of members. A site like this one (AA) is probably a bit different as many of us seek out such a site to help us grow our own sites. We are the 1% in our own communities.

I'm not saying that content is not important. Content is still king, for without compelling content we have nothing, but it is only a part of the equation.

Another good read... http://rubiconconsulting.com/downloads/whitepapers/Rubicon-web-community.pdf

 

That's a great article and a good read.

It's certainly realistic, but in my opinion I wouldn't worry about the amount of members at the start in response to the OP's post. Focus on getting the posts and activity up. When new members see your active forum, they likely will join. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying members aren't important. They most definitely are. They're what makes up a forum.