Guests

[harper]

I've been keeping a close eye on Forum activity over the last few weeks. More often than not we have several guests on the Forum - often more guests than members - but only a small proportion of them turn into registered Members.

The only practical differences between un-registered guests and registered members are that (1) guests can't see images, (2) guests can't follow links in posts, (3) guests don't have profiles and don't have access to the Private Message system, and (4) guests can't reply to posts or post new messages. Guests can read all the text content that Members contribute to the Forum.

When we were starting out (just six months ago!) it was important to encourage as many people as possible to take a look in the hope that some would join up. And they did!

Now we're past 1000 members (and growing fast, if today is anything to go by), I'm wondering if maybe it's time we looked at guest privileges again. Should we be restricting what guests can see rather more, in the hope of persuading more of them to become Members? Would that produce an increase in the numbers signing up, or would it just discourage people from having anything more to do with us?

I don't have a settled position on these questions. I'd be very interested in what the rest of you think...

[lightspear]

(09-03-2010 01:24 AM)harper Wrote: Guests cannot see links in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking here to see links.Should we be restricting what guests can see rather more, in the hope of persuading more of them to become Members? Would that produce an increase in the numbers signing up, or would it just discourage people from having anything more to do with us?

It depends on what you want.

If you want to have more active members, then continue to do what you are already doing - write interesting messages, publish interesting pictures, and invite interesting people to do the same.

But if you want just to have more registered users, no matter if they registered once and then disappeared for several months or even forever, then you should prohibit guests to do anything without registration.

[harper]

What we want, I think, is an active lively group of people with a wide variety of experience and interests, all sharing and helping each other out. Member numbers by themselves don't mean much, but they are an indicator of our success and popularity so it is important to keep them rising.

Be that as it may, I'm off for a day's rope and photography. Might even do something hojo-based...

[Nikita]

(09-03-2010 09:41 AM)harper Wrote: Guests cannot see links in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking here to see links.What we want, I think, is an active lively group of people with a wide variety of experience and interests, all sharing and helping each other out. Member numbers by themselves don't mean much, but they are an indicator of our success and popularity so it is important to keep them rising.

I think more traffic will increase the numbers of active members.

I see that Bruce follows tweets and it's been my experience that tweets encourage visitors. Interested visitors will stay and participate.

There are a number of rope enthusiasts as well as people exploring bondage and the alternative lifestyle that piggyback and follow others' followers on Guests cannot see links in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking here to see links..

Here's an Guests cannot see links in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking here to see links. of how I keep up with people or sites I'm interested in. Look in the upper right hand corner. People have this widget on their cell phones and desktops.

If this site had a twitter account, I'd put them on my stalk list and follow the updates. Guests cannot see images in the messages. Please register to forum by clicking here to see images.

Latest posts or new topics can be automatically tweeted with freeware.

[harper]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm a bit behind the times in this area. I found myself wasting so much time on MSN and Yahoo instant messaging a few years ago that I gave it up completely in order to get other things done, and apart from FetLife and this place I've kept well away from social networking, micro-blogging and etc.. I think I've got a Facebook profile although I can't offhand remember which of several names I used for it. I do know it's never been active.

I'll put Twitter on my list of things to investigate, and I may well be calling on you and other experts for help!

Anyone else have any suggestions for this kind of thing?

[harper]

In the ten days since we passed 1,000 we've gained another 99 members. That's ten a day. If we had maintained that rate from the start in August 09, we'd now be over 2,000.

How to explain the rapid growth recently? Well, one possibility is that the simple fact of breaking the 1,000 barrier makes us look better established, nore credible, etc. and helps to persuade people to join who might have passed us by if we had fewer members. A kind of snowballing positive-feedback effect?

A few posts ago I wrote "Member numbers by themselves don't mean much". Well, maybe some particular numbers mean quite a lot!