Non posting members

I usually see people sign up to this forum, and they don't make any posts.

Have you experienced something like that in your forums?

and what are the reasons for this?

I figured some of the reasons, but there must be others too:

1) They sign up only for a feauture of the forum. In my case I see two - three members that never posted, come and play games in the arcade section.

2) Link popullarity signups. They sign up, put a link in their signature, so they gain one incoming link to their site from their member profile page. This is lame enough to consider it as spam, so whem I found such a member I delete them from the system.

3) Spam post sign ups. They sign up to post advertisments in the marketplace section, but when they come to post they see that there is a minimum posts limit to post there, so they leave the site and never come back.

Those are my thoughts, but I would love to know if you have any opinion on this - recommendations.

yes, the link in the profile is something a lot of people use to add backlinks to their own sites. On thing you could do about this is to only show the link in profiles if they have a postcount of at least 10. I also see a lot of forums that only allow you to update your signature line after you have posted 100 times

I think that this solution is unfair for the real members.

making 100 posts just to be able to put your sig is bad for them, and propably some of them will consider this as a reason to leave the forum.

you can always change that to a lower number, like maybe 10 or whatever

I agree with this, but such a solution demands coding, so it would be valuable only if you have a lot of people that doing this.

When you have such a problem (lots of people doing this) then you propably have phpBB and a spam bot found you.

The only solution on this is putting some kind of activativation code on the sign up or in the sig change process.

I offer some VB tutorials for members , they sign up , see them and leave.
I like this forum though , so i post a bit :).
I think it'll be good when it grows

what you say here i believe is a major factor, and i am glad to hear that you delete these people, and just recently i noticed the backlink from my profile through the checker at iwebtool, which is cool :) so i went ahead and added ur links to both sleek and j love (and already was on leet link, be sure to PM me if you need a re-index)..but anyway back on topic.

i think the main reason people dont post is because there are too many forums nowadays, and also most people can not appreciate the thrill of being apart of a great community such as this one, and try to take advantage of all that they can as you said earlier, spam in the ad board, link in profile, play games, etc.. these kinds of things are ridiculous, they shouldnt sign up in the first place.. i have maybe 30+ members on my site now and about half of them dont log-in.

Yeah...I cant agree more on that about there are too many forums around us . TOO MANY! I just cant image how many webmasters forum in my bookmarks now they have similiar names, similiar categories, smiliar systems, and similiar user names with same threads they copied for sale. . NOT FUN! lol ..

That's true. When I started this site I was thinking of that too, but I also thought that the most of these sites are just default theme forums with no mods that owned by kids, with no really experience in the 'webmastering' fields.

So I suppose (and want to believe) that I can make a unique webmaster forum that people will like to use, but this is propably something that will show in time.

By the way what is your honest opinion about this site? I really want to know if you like it, and what do you think of it.

Well.. to be honest i dont surf webmasters forum a lot before Jan . I usually just register an account then surf around if i found it's useful i bookmark it . I dont have much to say just read around. lol .. I dont really know what makes me think about launch a girly forum this year so i began to do some research and read about webmasters stuff these 2 months.  I hate to say i dont like most of big boards. People just posting ads, or want to sell their site & domain names. They are not sharing or talk about real useful stuff sometime. I'm not talking about they all like that . But some forums do give me that feeling. Well.. they have good number base of members, but not much useful stuff there.

I found webdigity is something different. I think that's your goal Nikolas, It will work. Even though it's not a big board right now. But i love the feeling that a small group of friends playing around and helping each other grow. At least, we two are giving each other some productive  information with those bots right now. =]

If they only play the arcade, ban them! The arcade takes up bandwidth, and spammers shouldn't be using the site's bandwidth. An easy way to fix this is to deny permission to the arcade for membergroups with <10 posts.

good idea!

Surprised me that people just join for play arcade game. lol

I wouldn't consider people playing the arcade spammers...

Ban someone that uses the arcade is not a good idea, but having a post limit to enter this area propably is the solution. I will do that. Thanks :)


Me too, but if you check the arcade's top scores there are some members that never posted in the forum....

haha... i just checked there.. yeah .. lol....that's funny . Perhaps your games are too good. =P

No it is just because if you search 'smf arcade' in Google we are in the third page. I know this is not so much but arcade and gaming searches are a really big number.

umm..really sounds like that . Perhaps i should install arcade mod for my vbulletin board to be attractive as well. lol ..

Yeah it is a nice way to get some members, but most of them will not use the forum besides that....

Does it cost a lot bandwidth ??

I don't think you need so much bandwidth. All the games are between 30 and 150 kb.

If you are on a shared hosting having 10 of thousands of visitors per day maybe it is a problem....

Okay ..then that wont be a problem to me at all .. It's quite new and i'm the only registered member now. I think if it cost credits to buy game entry , they may begin to post on the board.. like monthly game entry cost 100 credits etc..

That's a nice idea. If your software supports it then do it :)

I'm sure VB allows it cos i paid credits for game entry once!! And it also allows people win credits by playing games.

Maybe not, but they are stilling using Webdigity's bandwidth.

for me if a user does not post on my forum within 3 months their account will be removed! Btu i do try and find out why they have not posted!

Actually, a lot of the times they're like, "Oh, this place is cool! I'll sign up!" and then they do and forget about the place.

The only time that having links in their profiles or signatures would help is if they actually posted. Otherwise people just kind of forget about them.

I get it quite a lot on my forums but I don't really worry about it too much. I worry about those forums that delete inactive users though; it makes your memberbase look more unpopular.

~Crystal

You are right. I realized that from the contests. When I do a new contest, I pm all the members, and allways there are coming people that never posted and start using the forum.

That means that these people somehow forget the site after they sign up.

Also, as it was in my case, I joined to post a problem I had with The Topsites and then I figured I would leave, and then post if I ever needed something. Then, yeah, you PMed me about the contest and I figured I'd try to help you guys out.

I think it would be much more annoying if you got a lot of people who would post their links and then leave. All the members of Mercury who are banned have been banned for that reason.

~Crystal

That really s**ks.

I mean people in many cases use forums to post their links, and I think that they should, but allways having in mind that they should give something in advance for what they get.

Before some time there was a guy here who wanted to make a post in the Marketplace of the forum, and as there is a post limit 5+ to post, he/she start posting in other threads posts like "thanks for sharing" or "cool".

Forum spamming is a big problem, and you should allways have something to deal with it, especcially if you run a phpBB forum. On a phpBB forum that I had, everyday bots where sign up there posting pharmacy or casino related topics....

I wish bots would sign up on Mercury. I don't mind them, because I know that they will help the site by scanning it and such, and you can always put them in a group where they cannot post.

~Crystal

As far as I know there are only phpBB bots, so you are safe anyway :)