How much time it takes for a new born online forum to get decent amount of participants and traffic sensitive?

dani, administrator

i just posted a thread accidentally with a wrong name. i noticed that i couldnt change the title of this thread. please remove it or change the title of thread. i tried to remove my cp, couldnt do it. thanks

Changed.

That's a very general question, and that really depends on you.

I have a forum with about 300 members, and the forum hasn't yet come to a state that can grow alone.
But for instance I meat today a guy that made a forum with 250 members in 12 hours!

There is not a fixed number for this. i have a forum with more than 300 members and 13000 posts, with a great postcount/member ratio and still i can't say it can go by itself. You need to work relentlessly to keep it active and nice.

This site is still not yet self-sufficient for more than a couple of hours ... nearly 70,000 members strong, and I don't know where we'd be without a great team of devoted moderators to keep things active and running smoothly.

Getting 500 members can take weeks, months, or years. With a good niche, the right promotion, and a good forum layout, I'd say it could take a few months if your lucky.

well, the problem with me is i have my own handcoded forum though i have lot of members nobody is coming forward to post or participate. my site has been around since one year and i get lot of traffic. do you think switching to vbulletin would solve my problem and my community will grow grow better????

Getting lots of traffic means nothing. Put yourself into the minds of your visitors. They come, they see an empty site where no one posts a lot. Why should they take the time to post when what they have to say won't be heard or they are unlikely to receive a reply?

The only advice I can give you is to POST POST POST yourself! I say this a real lot, but I might as well just repeat myself here, at the chance of being repetitive. Members are selfish. They only care that what they have to post gets seen and replied to. So the goal to turning an inactive forum into an active one is to make sure that you instantly reply to every thread or post that is made. One member at a time will see that THEIR own post has been answered right away, and so they'll come back. Don't worry right away about getting conversation going. That will come with time. At first, just focus on making sure that YOU personally answer every single post made within a short amount of time.

At that part I would like to make a question. Is it good to post on every single thread in your forum? Isn't this image of the 'one man show' bad for you? I mean that if you start making threads and post replies to anyone else's threads is good for your forum?

I guess propably not. What is your opinion?