Starting Forum

Hello,

I know, that it is a good idea to have a forum. But I don't know how to start.
I have made one, but I don't know how to make that people write something.
Is a good idea to make some posts by myself or wait?

 

I have even seen people who hired others to make few posts every day.
And others who posted themselves under many fake names to pretend the forum is high-traffic.

It is not good idea to wait. To make few posts on your own is definitely a good idea, but do it under one nick, no cheating is needed if you have good things to share on the forum, it will eventually and gradually pickup some traffic and community will start to build.

 

well, when you have some friends or collegues it can be good to ask them to write too. as long as you dont cheat (people expect more with more users, or leave, and in empty forums about good topics new people often start with many posts because they hope to become an old school regular in the end like moderators or something, so dont fake.

still, dont wait either. start posting as much as you can.

 

Exactly as Dirkjan says. There are people who will post just for being the top guy/girl on the forum.

I have been an oldtimer on a forum of certain software company, which was completely self-supported, meaning they had free support there for users, entirely managed by volunteer forum members. The rank they got from being frequent poster mattered a lot to them. However the company changed the forum software many times meaning people lost ranks and had to start anew. They lost many posters because of that.

So if you can lure such people you will be lucky.

 

Content, quality and activity are what I would say are the three most important elements to a successfull forum. No one will post in an empty forum, no one will join a forum that is full of crap, and no one will return to a forum that does not have enough new content to warrant going back.

 

Thanks for giving me an advice. The main idea is to have posts not empty forum .

 

Check the Forum Zone at http://www.theforumzone.com/forums/index.php? there is a guy here who runs it. The forum is full of good tips and they have something called the post exchange, where forum admins post on others forums in exchange for posts on their forum. You can get a lot of conversation going pretty quickly, but to make a forum work you need to have new people coming on all the time. If no one visits, all that work will be for nothing.