When just starting a new community, do you...?
 

Do you create fake member accounts and create fake conversations in order to fill it up sometimes? Just so that new members don't think "oh man this site is dead screw this!". This is the first time I've done a fake account thing, I made about 100 fake accounts and am filling up the forums with some fake half way decent conversations to get things rolling. Is this unethical? Or is it a good idea to kick start a community?

*Happy Fathers Day*

I don't, but apparently some people do. One or two isn't horrible, but come on, 100?

Heh. well 100 simply because we had so many sections and we need a lot of fake conversations to fill them up. Once our memberbase grows we'll obviously discontinue their use. Heh.

It is good to start off with about 10 or less forums when starting a new community for the fact that all of them dont look dead and people leave. 100 fake accounts?...jeez you must have been bored ;)

Hehe... I know too many forums is bad, that's why we made the fake accounts to fill them up. Then there will be alot for new members to look at, maybe even too much at first so they'll need t come back. I'll try to shorten it a LIL more maybe. :)

The best way to start out a forum is just get 4 or 5 of your friends to help you out by posting a lot until you get some more people to join.

^^^ I agree, the best way to start a forum is with your friends who are interested in the subject.

Yeah I've done that now with my staff as well, good call.

I made 5 different fake names, One for each type of person that would join my site, I use them only to see the different views that they would see, no posting. I think that this is a little shady. I sure wouldn't let members know that you are doing that. Cause if I was a member I would leave if I knew that someone was doing that.

It's definitely a good idea to start off your forum with. But don't go overboard, you just need to establish a point in a thread so that discussion can be created from it. And you don't need 100 different members to do that. ;)

I have high restriction on doing so, even my members who are my friends want to have their 2nd/3rd accounts I would delete it if I find out.

when I first started my forum I asked my friends on the forum I always posted to join and for months their home has been my site from that time.

On another note:

I would lose your first lead news item on your homepage. If your news items are talking about how slow you are and asking what can you do to get people more involved - people will just assume it’s dead and it sucks. You want to give the impression that you are in DEMAND. Talk about the surge of interest since you have added a couple new features - say it "gave you and your members a buzz" - ask "what else do they want?" instead of “what can I do to make you come back?”.

Spin the negative into something of a bit more excitement - and post more news items. It shows that there is a lot more happening.

The other thing I would suggest is to ditch the requirement to register for all the forums. Who wants to go through the butt pain of registering if they can’t see any reason to register? People’s attention span is too tiny on the net. Most will see that requirement and move on to another site. When I started my first forum several years ago, I made registration mandatory in order to view the forums and threads. As soon as I finally ditched that - my registration rate tripled.

Finally: Start some polls and semi controversial threads that will evoke some type of response (I don’t mean things like Politics or Religious views – crikey – that’s dangerous). Lead them on so that some guest viewing the thread will say: "Hey - I’ve got something to add to this!". Polls are also great because they are an easy participation starter.

I haven’t seen your actual forums as I couldn’t be asked to register for them - however if you have more forums than real members - you are going to have an impossible time building a community. More forums = more effort to find what you want to talk about – people do not have the attention span to do this. If you have 100 posts per day and 50 forums, that’s only an average of 2 new posts per forum per day. More than anything else - that will make your site look dead.
Trim your forums down and add more as you need. A good guideline is if you are getting more than a 1.5 pages worth of updated threads a day (i.e. 45 updated threads in a forum) - add a new forum and slowly build from there.

Just my viewpoint – good luck on building