| cheat-master30 |
03-24-2009 09:16 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rene Kriest
(Post 1775477)
I second that.
In my experience only ~5% of the registered members are really active over time. The number depends on the size of a board's membership. The names vary while the number of participants remains the same.
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I'd actually agree roughly with this. Note how for a lot of boards, you've often got around a tenth to a third with zero posts, an even larger amount with less than 10 posts, and the amount that stay around even for months is usually a very small minority of members. Take this forum for example (vBulletin.org). 310,972 members, and about 20,286 are active in terms of logging in over the last couple of days. Then the memberlist. Only shows members with over 5 posts, so there are 20906 of those. That's not a whole big amount of the site itself, there are WAY more registrations than active users, and the true value of really active users (let's say 100 or so posts plus) is probably only about a 1000 or less. Definitely true the 5% theory seems to stand for a lot of forums.
Quote:
I was working as a mod for a Fu?ball-Bundesliga team (Major League Soccer/Premier League Soccer in Germany); we hat around 70.000 members and an estimated 10k nominal members which could have been deleted (no articles written at all, last login was more than 2 years ago). On the other hand we had a members to visitors ratio of 1/10: one member equaled 10 not registered visitors. Around 0,1% was active over time.
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Again accurate. Website visitors is always going to be a far higher statistic than forum members is, if only because many visitors either 1. just read content, 2. stopped in to read a page from a search engine or 3. doesn't want to take time filling out forms for a site they might not want to use as a forum.
Quote:
Kyrasis6's main point is the following: you need to take into account different interests. Some folks only registered for the chat and do not hang out in the forums and vice versa. If you have such a great forum that people just drop by for a short glimpse at some information (Tom's Hardware comes into mind) you did something right - not wrong. Boards that force me to register for trivial information get the boot.
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As for forcing people to register to view, you're right, bad idea, even ignoring SEO for a couple of minutes. Why? You get a ton of member accounts that will never be used simply because they wanted to view the content and didn't like it/didn't want to stay around/only joined to see said content. That and it does put off quite a few intelligent members who MAY have joined, just didn't because they couldn't see the content and felt they had no reason to join and participate in your forum (towards people who force registration to view, not the person quoted). |
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