New forums with loads of members

Luke B said:
That's a wonderful idea! Is this the wiki you are referring to? This would also help bring in users looking for this kind of help correct?
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Yes that is the one. Any content is beneficial. Yes if you have that information and then anyone looking for that information it will help them find your site. You kind of need to decide if you are going to aim to getting new people in to the hobby or if you only want to draw in experienced people.

I think you would be further off drawing in both crowds by having information there for newbs and the experienced people will also join in because the majority of people do like to help.
 
-GR- said:
Yes that is the one. Any content is beneficial. Yes if you have that information and then anyone looking for that information it will help them find your site. You kind of need to decide if you are going to aim to getting new people in to the hobby or if you only want to draw in experienced people.

I think you would be further off drawing in both crowds by having information there for newbs and the experienced people will also join in because the majority of people do like to help.
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I agree completely. The site will work at its best when all levels of experience are present. I'm thinking the site as a whole can support both crowds as it grows. As it sits currently, the majority of users are new to photography but the experienced ones are enjoying it just the same.
 
Maybe a little nit-picking but seeing the word "Slr", it didn't occur to me that it is about photography at first.... Especially pairing up with the word user, it makes for one really nice logo design with great flow. But I am too used to seeing SLR in all caps. Or "D"SLR these days.
 
Panupat said:
Maybe a little nit-picking but seeing the word "Slr", it didn't occur to me that it is about photography at first.... Especially pairing up with the word user, it makes for one really nice logo design with great flow. But I am too used to seeing SLR in all caps. Or "D"SLR these days.
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I've been going back and forth on this since first building the site. I agree that SLR is more fitting but it comes off very harshly. The capital L throws spacing and flow off. Perhaps adding a short descriptive tag line would be better?
 
Luke B said:
I would never consider myself a jealous person but I can't help but feel a bit envious of forums with a boat load of members. I know this takes time and quality trumps quantity any day so I'm not bitter, only curious.

I see so many forums that are bran spanking new that have a crazy amount of members within the first month. Are they gaming the system? Is the content so amazingly good people just can't wait to join (even if it looks a mess)? Or are they just marketing SEO brain children with motivation perhaps supplied by NTZ (limitless reference) stopped at nothing?

Luke
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Nope, some might, but most aren't gaming the system.

There are existing sites sometimes where they have a strong community but no forum yet. If they create a spin off site or integrate it in to their existing site, they start and boom, those regulars all enjoy the new features of the site.

Some people advertise the niche market they're targetting and work goes around. Once the site goes live they all jump on board.

Others simply pay for proper advertising to get their name listed on search results and stuff like that.

Our chat network runs a Swedish betting chat room, and they had 200+ unique users in 30 minutes the moment they opened, and it's been active since, and thousands of posts in days on their site. They worked hard for that, and none of it is gamed or fake content. Ontopic posts are the only ones allowed.
 
Floris said:
Our chat network runs a Swedish betting chat room, and they had 200+ unique users in 30 minutes the moment they opened, and it's been active since, and thousands of posts in days on their site. They worked hard for that, and none of it is gamed or fake content. Ontopic posts are the only ones allowed.
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Those are some great numbers Floris! Wonderful insight, thank you.
 
Just a note on sites with a lot of members - I'm sure more than a few of them have a lot of really active genuine members, but in my experience - I run a vB forum which has been operating for nearly 9 years and is very location specific (ie the forum is very specific to Australia).

Because of the popularity of the forums and the good search engine rankings we get, we've always been a target for spam. When trying to deal with this, I decided to try tracking the geo-location of IP addresses of registering members (using the Maxmind database). I was astounded to see so many people registering from countries outside of Australia (in particular China, India, Philippines, Malaysia, etc). I also ask people for their location when registering (mandatory user profile field), and discovered that almost all of these users were lying about their location. Further analysis of existing users showed that they were also the people posting all the spam.

So now, I have an automated system to check all new registrations and anyone from a country on my "blacklist" gets placed into moderation so I can decide quickly whether to allow them in or just delete them. This has already made major progress with spam.

The thing that surprised me was just how many of these registrations we were getting each day - we get 10-15 new registrations a day, and nearly half of them are from people outside of Australia - almost all of whom lie about their location when they register.

Looking back at the users in the database, we have a LOT of members who were not legitimate users and only signed up to spam the forums.

Naturally, this approach does not work quite as well with a more international forum - one of my other sites is almost as busy and has a very international focus, with quite a few legitimate members from those regions where spammers tend to come from. As such, I've needed to take a slightly different approach and don't auto-moderate such users. Fortunately, spam is less of a problem on that site - possibly due to the nature of the content.
 
That's why i usually do manual check for every new registered members and keep them on watch list for few days until they show up again and post something .
 
iTuN3r said:
That's why i usually do manual check for every new registered members and keep them on watch list for few days until they show up again and post something .
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You must have a fairly small site? Not practical to do this with multiple sites with a lot of new users across them every day.
 
Sim said:
You must have a fairly small site? Not practical to do this with multiple sites with a lot of new users across them every day.
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Ye it's small but i have seperate staffs group who are supposed to do that work for me .... i understand your pain can't wait till 1.1 comes out which will let us easily handle with those lurkers .
 
iTuN3r said:
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...iced-administrators-beware.18596/#post-240551

I am member in similar community forums that i am running on the moment and they are all full of signature spammers.
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Ahh - sig spam is certainly a problem, but in my experience only about half of the issue. We get a lot of people who will sign up, post what (at first glance) seems like a meaningful post, and include a subtle link to an unrelated website. These are people who get paid to do exactly this - they get paid by the forum post.

I've seen job ads posted asking for people to do this kind of work - and I' ve seen the "task lists" giving people instructions on exactly what to post and which sites to post it on. Seems my site is on one of those task lists somewhere :(

It takes some careful attention to pick out spam like this!
 
As an experiment I recently opened up a new forum with no theme or content. Within three months I had a thriving community of over 1,500 members, thousands of threads and tens of thousands of posts. Every single post was spam. That proved that it's easy to attracted members under any circumstances but they are not members you would necessarily want. If a forum has good content supported by a genuine membership then I think you'll find like attracts like and overtime you'll build a nice community.

I personally prefer to spend time on a forums that are easy on the eye. I like a well designed forum style but I don't want it to detract from the content. In that respect SLRuser has one of the best forum styles I've seen in a quite a while. It really is very good and I'm sure it can only help attract new members. I wish you the best of luck :)
 
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