The hardest part about maintaining an active forum..

I read a lot of posts on misc. boards where webmasters ask how to make their new forum grow and how to advertise it. To me these are the easiest parts to making your forum grow. My main problem which has happened four times in a row now, is once your community becomes large with over 300,000+ or more posts, some of your top posters become very popular and then decide to create a forum of their own since they do not realize how much work is involved in running a forum. So they then begin spamming every member through private messages and emails to join their forum which takes away from your community. Even though you have rules about this, it either makes the people upset since they then consider the person a friend and think that spamming copy and paste messages to 100+ users at once is "ok".

Either that or they won't say anything and just leave anyway to post on the other forum which is just a default skinned ezboard or phpBB board with an Advertisement in the header. So the problem with having an active board is when it gets large enough it turns into a spam fest. I wonder how some corporate forums (especially insanely strict ones that ban and moderate for the slightest things) manage to continue to grow. The community of users is what makes a forum active, if this site didn't have any people posting noone would be here. So I wonder how do most forums keep hundreds of people active and coming back when the top posters can easily copy the forum's idea and contact all of their friends to join their board.

 

probably with such a huge community you should look to promote it more, get finance and make it more bigger, as long as you help people in your forum they would stick there and new members will keep flowing.
give away 30-50% of your profits to members, let every one feel the revenue part, after all forums are not run by one member they need mass participation.

 

I do those things It is easy to bring in new users and make things larger, but as far as maintaining a large community where there are 100+ people online and posting 24 hours per day is a different story. Then again, those sites like that besides Myspace where around since 1996 so I suppose timing is everything.

 

One way to help keep your users from defecting to another site is to build some tools at your website that can't be easily copied. For example there are some sites that talk about broadband that have tools to configure and test your connection. This helps keep people coming back because it is more than just the forum.

Rewarding your top members is also worth considering. Revenue sharing would be one option, but random gifts might cost a lot less, but be just as worth while. You could also consider doing some type of monthly giveaway based on people's participation (one entry for every post or something like that). If you give away something nice and related to your topic, it can help keep people on your site. If you can get a sponsor to donate the item for the giveaway it works even better.

 

Yeah I had that thought a couple of years ago. I offer a forum with a built in online game and there is a section that rewards the top posters. The thing is the after the regulars win every reward they then begin to "defect" as you so call it Does this site offer giveaway prizes?