I've been gone for 2 months and have 12 pages to catch up on. :eek: I'm on Page 2, so sorry for being very out-of-order in my reply to this:
I disagree with this. My own site used to have very active and hopping forums, and it was everything I could do to keep up with the topics of any given day. How did that happen? I, the admin, went out and baited people in. I started with friends, people from other forums I was on, even added a link to my site in the signature of all my personal e-mails. I brought in some folks, who in turn brought in some folks, and so on. That worked wonders.Quote:
Admins and mods don't "bring in" traffic. Search engines do. And as I've already said 10 times, what is posted to the forum is what will return in searches and it will bring similar traffic.
What exactly do you think can be done by the admins and mods to bring in traffic? The site is already decently ranked in the various major search engines. We are not obscure in the least. That's the best we can do.
Like AO, my own forums are presently all but dead. You want to know why? I haven't had time to bait people in anymore. I plan on jumping back on top of that in the not-so-distant future. Site's dead, I'm willing to take the blame for it.
Google's great, but footwork and word-of-mouth are highly, highly underrated. You can't build something and then expect it to grow itself. You have to feed it, and that IMHO is part of the admin/mods jobs. Once they do their part, the users take care of the rest.
On that note, I think HTRegz's points made on Page 2 were right on the money. It's a balance.
And now I'm going to continue trying to catch up on this thread... :eek: