Adding fake users

Do you think for a new forum it would be a good idea to add fake users, say about 50?

spence

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Just adding them wont make any difference.

But making some account and post to your forum - even that it looks like a very "scammy" thing to do - can help because it will make your community look more active

Thankx for clearing that idea up.

spence

I once saw a forum that was only a few days old and had a few hundred people join on the first day.

It made me laugh 

The bad thing that was the forum had a few thousand members and hardly anyone online and only a couple of posts?

The closed beta, is always a good trick, only allow people to join if they are invited and offer a "waiting list" for others, now you have an exclusive club. Add your 50 or so fake users as your first beta group along with mailing as many people as you can think of with invites, once they arrive leave them to build up content behind closed door and once a week approve those in the waiting list. once your up to 300 users and an equal number of posts open the forum to every one.

The closed beta works because people want to join groups and if you tell them they can't they want to even more. Add that those on the waiting list, must post at least n number of times within the first month or be removed while invitees don't and you have the perfect tool for getting people to post, remember most users will be those from the waiting list not invitees, but from the number of users it would appear the other way round. However its important to open the forum up quickly and praise reward those who are from the pre open waiting list, or they will be disillusioned quickly.

The closed beta...

Great Idea thank you for sharing that...

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Closed beta is cool but only when your application looks like a custom application.

I mean having a closed beta in a vbulletin forum site looks more like a joke, right?

everything can be made to look like something it isn't, its not vbulletin but rather then next generation communication community V2

The closed beta has to appear to be worth joining and works on exclusivity or perception of rather then mechanics.

after all look at googles closed beta's are they amazingly new concepts or very good rehashes

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I really like that idea ventureskills .....

I think theAdminzone.com do a shared post thing.

You sign up how many posts you are looking for, anything from 10-200 posts per week, but you have to post the same amount on the other guys forum.
This doesn't always work, i had a poor guy agree to this and he posted about things my members didnt agree with, that opened up a whole can of worms..

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interesting...

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You can find a similar service at the adminfusion forums, but I am not sure how good is that. The purpose of a community is to have people, not just posts

It is just not good to do that, I am not one to say what other people should do but I can't create fake users myself.  I would like to but it is wrong for me.

Create too many fake users and it's obvious when none of them post.

Create too few and it looks obvious they either work for you or with you. Hiring posters who make silly conversations isn't much better.

Posting by yourself looks pathetic and desperate.

I agree with Tim that the best approach would be to generate a bit of buzz first. Perhaps get known in another similar topic forum and you will have people follow you - that's how I found this place.

As to the blind beta, I watched a crafting site do that extremely well. They even had a gadget where you could look up where you were in the waiting list. The site got tons of valuable and free word of mouth advertising and was the talk of tons of blogs and other craft forums. I signed up mainly to keep up with my niche as well as for the advertising potential. Haven't been back and don't see it mentioned anymore on blogs or forums. There's another quick lesson - don't overhype because when you don't live up to it people will drop you in a heartbeat.

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The only way to make this work from the start is by already having an established site before starting your forum. So if for instance you have a site with a mailing list or an active user base it is very easy to create some buzz - especially if you can have some contest too - but in general the starting process of a forum is very hard.

I had more than 2000 webmaster subscribers when I started this forum, and even that my other relevant sites had enough traffic to promote such a site, it was really really hard. This is probably because even if you can send thousands of people to a new forum, it is still a new forum so they wont mind to post anything to it.

So I am struggling and decided to give away $50 a month in cash to the top poster and $500 to the most relevant and top poster of the year and $500 to a fan favorite. So far  12 hours after a e-mail blast, blog post, and social media announcement....bubkiss....I am starving for idas.

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