It's not a crime - but questionable in terms of ethics and morality.We all have our standards.....
For instance, if you owned a store that sold a certain appliance, would you hire a bunch of fake customers to come in and pretend they were buying things...so that the real customer put their money up quicker? I would not.
Nothing illegal about it, but I don't see where it adds anything. If a site cannot provide a real value (info, community, etc.) then faking it won't fix it.
Ethics and morality? What has ethics got to do with paying someone to help kickstart your forum. I'm puzzled by your response. Every company on the planet makes false promises and stretches the truth when they advertise their products - all we are trying to do is add content to a forum so that it isn't empty. Is anyone being hurt by this?
I have some experience with this issue. Generally speaking, for English language forums, it isn't worth it. The people who work as forum posters charge very little but their standard of writing is reflected by this. Most services use people from India, Phillipines, Malaysia etc. Whilst they can write English, their grasp of English grammar is not that great, which makes reading posts very difficult.
If you were willing to pay a little more and get someone who was a native English speaker, it could be worth it.
Alternatively you could:
- Made dummy accounts and started conversations with yourself until real members join.
- Do a post exchange with another forum owner.
- Post high quality articles on your forum regularly and use a mod like XenPorta to highlight them on the home page.
Obviously, both of the above solutions will take up your time, which is why many forum owners choose to bring in good forum posters.
If you already have a successful website with a loyal readership, getting people to join up to a brand new forum is fairly straight forward. Bear in mind though that generally speaking, people don't join empty forums. 99% of people generally read a forum first before signing up so if you have no content, it's doubtful anyone will sign up.
From my experience, the best way to get a forum started if you don't have a site to push traffic to it is to:
- Create a big competition to launch the forum - make sure the prize(s) is good enough to encourage people to post. Also, I'd stay away from a top posting competition and go with either a referral competition (which you watch closely) or a 'best post' competition.
- Become active on a forum with a similar forum and place a link to your forum in the signature. Many forums don't let people promote rival forums in their signature but if you can it's a good technique. Become active on the forum, help people out and make friends - you'll find that people will want to join your forum if you write good quality posts.
If you do want to go down the paid forum posting route, I recommend
Digital Point Forums for low quality posters at around $0.15-$0.25 a post and freelance websites such as
eLance,
PeoplePerHour and
Odeskif you want to pay a bit more and assure that the quality of posts is good (though you can get cheap posters there too if you wish).
Good luck
Kevin