For almost 1 month I only get 14 members and this including myself. 4 days 15 members is really a good number for me.

I'm sort of in a different situation now. Since I last posted above, I've got 80 members. My problem now is getting them to actually post!

If even half of them became regular posters it would be a great thriving little forum, but at the moment I have 2 people that post semi-regularly and thats it.

My biggest issue is my main competitor is "official" whereas I am a "fan site". Official site is booming, mine isn't. I'm a moderator on the official site but apart from a link in my signature I can't openly ask for people to go join and post.

I would have to say I wouldnt agree. Word of mouth works wonders when you are selling something. But when you want people to join your site? Advertising is better. Yes.. I mean spend a little money buying some advertising from Dani (Hey dani.. Im soon to buy some from you once i get the site completely up .

I can't even get my moderators to post let alone my members. How hard is this!! Surely with over 90 members someone would feel the urge to post? But nope they all just sit there silently.

Pfft this is hard.

Yes. I see what you mean. Give them something to come back. A reward system. A arcade. Contest that give them something in return for posting on your website.

Thank you for the tips (if you hit postcount x, you can get free advertisement on our site).. I like that and perhaps might just look into doing that one time!

In looking at several different forums, I've noticed that the majority of members either don't post or post rarely. There is always a nucleus of people who post regularly and chat with each other. There are also people who join, post madly for a few weeks and then stop. We've tried to vary content on our site (which is a musician's), with off topic threads and rather mindless games, and we seem to have some members who stick to the off topic threads and/or the game threads. If you're just looking to increase post numbers, you might consider off topic threads geared to outside interests of your members. But, if anyone has good ideas on how to get the registered nonposting members posting, I'd love to hear it too.

With my latest board, I've gotten 30 members in less than 7 days. Here's how:

My nemesis has an old UBB that has zero organization. 90% of all post go into one forum. So I built a vB3 with php portal frontend, a chat program and photopost. But most importantly, orginazation via multiple forums fitting the theme of the community.

Then I changed my sig file to have my URL in every post (oldest trick in the book), then I posted a thread about my board (dirtyest trick in the book).

Well it worked! 30 users in less than seven days.

so if you had to pick one or two things that caused your slow start to go wrooom.. what would you say that was? Just time or something more substantial?

--Tone

any kind of posting incentive only leads to problems. a great example is gaia online with their easter day ball, they purposely promote bumping(so those 200 million or so posts are just bumps and spams). so really any kind of post rewards leads to spamming eventually which leads to undesired content and wasted db space.