[Rene Kriest]

Originally Posted by Kyrasis6

people who say they've been readers since 2002 and NEVER logged on or posted because they always find the information they need on the site.

Not all is as it seems.

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.

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.

You need to consider wether you want visitors to register or not. For my marketing system I need an established member base. It depends on members and not so much on visitors because my forums deals with health and certain areas are protected from curious eyes. People like the information they find but tend to not come back or only stay for a short period of time. I wouldn't make registration mandatory if my board featured already 50k members. So far my board covers a niche topic and while the member counter is steady on the rise we are still far from 10k members.

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.