Welcome headers - Improve community registration rates

vBulletin 3.6 users click here for the 3.6 compatible version of this plugin.

The out of the box vBulletin style does not have a robust method of informing users about their current activity status or user level. As a result, guests entering on a page other than the homepage (which is most often the case) have no idea what a forum is about or that they may need to register. Additionally, there are no visible status indicators, making it confusing for unconfirmed, unapproved or new members to know what to do or where to begin.

To help solve these problems, the welcome headers plugin creates a 5-part set of conditionals to better introduce members to your community while pushing them to register, activate or post. The default templates are just that, default ? I highly encourage you to tweak the language and functions to meet the needs of your actual community environment.

Modifications/ Instructions:
Template edits: 2
Plugins: 1 (adds 1 template and several settings)

This template hack should take under 5 minutes to implement and customize.

What?s new in 4.1.0
The 4.1.0 version of this system is a complete rewrite from earlier versions. All of the original functionality still exists; however, the system has been improved to make it much more modular. With the new version, you can now turn on/off individual welcome header messages, configure the content and change other settings all from your ACP Options panel. Additionally, a 5th welcome header has been added for global announcements. With the exception of one small phrase change, this upgrade is seamless to upgrade.

Upgrade Instructions:
Full upgrade instructions can be found in the attached zip file. However, to avoid confusion anyone upgrading from the 4.0.x version of this plugin to 4.1.x should do the following:

1 ? Upload the new version of the plugin file based on your version of vBulletin (3.5 or 3.6). Be sure to set the override option to ?yes?.
2 ? Go to your phrase manager and search for the phrase ?first_visit_message?, copy any customizations you have made to this phrase into the phrase ?welcome_guest?.
3 ? Go to your vBulletin options, select the ?Welcome Header System? group and configure the options as desired.

Customizing the content / messages
To customize which messages appear or what they say, go to vBulletin options, select the ?Welcome Header System? group and configure the options as desired. Each phase can be modified by adding translation text.

Details on how it all works:
Step One: Turning lurkers into Members
For most websites, upwards of 50% of traffic (or more) comes through search engines or deep links to threads, profiles and categories. Out of the box, vBulletin only displays a welcome message on the forum-homepage, meaning someone who enters through any other page does not have the benefit of seeing an explanation of the site or welcome message. The guest welcome header is used to explain the purpose of your site, sell users on the benefits of joining the community and push them to proactively register.

Step Two: Making Users Confirm their Account
Many vBulletin sites require email confirmation prior to being able to post or access an account. However, activation emails are often misdirected to spam folders, ignored or simply deleted, leaving unconfirmed users with little access rights and no explanation as to what is wrong with their account. The unconfirmed welcome header is used to inform unconfirmed members of their account status and to direct them to automatically resend their activation email, or to contact the webmaster for support.

Step Three: Get non-posting users to post
Another chronic problem faced by many forums is insuring users post after registering. Many new visitors register in order to access certain features with the intent of posting, but never do so. The never posted welcome header is used to encourage users to post for their first time and should ideally be linked directly to an introductions or new member forum to help users "break the ice".

Step Four: Getting inactive users to become more active
Many members start out as lurkers, register, post once or twice and then go back to being lurkers. Often time these members are not actively thinking about participating in topics or are still shy about interacting. The inactivity welcome header reminds members to make a post after a predetermined amount of time as specified by the forum administrator.

Step Five: General Announcements
Unfortunately the standard announcements are often overlooked or never even seen by members who use the "new posts feature". As a result, urgent notices may be missed by users causing problems and high volumes of support requests. The global announcement welcome header creates a message shown to all members who do not fall into the other welcome header groups (guest, unconfirmed, never posted, inactive). Whether it be a scheduled outage/ upgrade, an important request or the need to display an advertisement in a prominent spot, global announcements allow an administrator to effectively and quickly display messages in a way that is certain to be read.

The results:
At first glance this system may seem a bit superfluous, however, the numbers rarely lie, nor does the feedback. Since posting this plugin in October, it has risen to over 1700 confirmed installations and is now one of the top 5 vBulletin plugins. On ScubaBoard.Com, the site the system was originally tested on, posting rates have increased by over 100%; new user registration rates by over 60%; user activity by 50% and the welcome/ intro & greets forum has exploded over 400%. If you browse through the pages of this thread you will find even more real life testimonials and experiences from the thousands of people using the system.

But enough about why -- give it a shot yourself and let me know how your results turn out.

vBulletin 3.6 users click here for the 3.6 compatible version of this plugin.

[freefallu]

Hi,

Dont get me wrong I think its a great hack. So thank you for posting it. This is my first experience with a community posting so freely hacks and mods for a programme i use and I think its brilliant:banana:

[Mobilestan]

i install this product
but have this error on top of the all pages

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING in /home/mobilestan/public_html/global.php(503) : eval()'d code(2) : eval()'d code on line 5

please help me !!!

[zurv]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Clearly having keywords and a good description in your welcome header is an important idea -- for search engines and for your users to understand the purpose of the site. With that said I have not noticed any negative impact of this hack on any of the major sites I've installed it to in terms of SE performance over a 6 or 12 month term.

With that said it is important to understand SEO and how your entire site relates to it. This hack is intended as a starting point -- I would not advise that anyone keeps their phrases default; that's just short changing yourself.

If you are truly concerned it is possible to set bots into their own usergroup and remove the welcome headers for them altogether. But as a word of caution, should an engine detect this, it could be seen as extremely negative.

It would be nice to make a way that this hack is hidden from spiders in the spiders xml file. This shouldnt be too hard to do..

-Griffe

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by zurv

It would be nice to make a way that this hack is hidden from spiders in the spiders xml file. This shouldnt be too hard to do..

It's not hard at all if you have a few other hacks running you can likely do it yourself.

[rareclownfish]

Has anyone tried to make this work on thier portal yet?

[zurv]

Originally Posted by Ted S

It's not hard at all if you have a few other hacks running you can likely do it yourself.

Ted_S, It would be great if the feature was integrated into the hack. I could always install the Search Bot User Group hack, but thats makes them see EVERYTHING as a registered user. Also it seems like a big hack for such a small problem.

[Ted S]

Originally Posted by zurv

Ted_S, It would be great if the feature was integrated into the hack. I could always install the Search Bot User Group hack, but thats makes them see EVERYTHING as a registered user. Also it seems like a big hack for such a small problem.

I don't particularly see that as a need everyone or most people would necessarily want by default. As I said in the first post, this hack is really meant to get you started. I would be glad to help you customize it for your site as it really is something that is meant to be tailored to every site as an individual and unique user experience.

[Raydar]

Originally Posted by zurv

Ted_S, It would be great if the feature was integrated into the hack.

Yes, this would be great for us. I don't think there is any reason why anyone would want a bot reading the same block of text over and over. Sure, you can place keywords into the text, but I think it would be better if the bot was reading the content of the page instead of a welcome header with keywords.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great hack and I love it, but here is where my problem lies -

For forums that focus on one subject, such as cars or planes it is easy to get keywords into your welcome text that relate to the page being crawled, because all pages basically are about the one subject.

But - my forums cover many subjects such as terrorism to tourism. It is hard to get keywords for all my subjects crammed into a welcome header.

So in my case it would be better to have the bot crawl the content of the page.

I think it would be great to have code placed into the hack somewhere that tells the bot to ignore the welcome header.

I can't write code, so I am at the mercy of the Guru's here.

Ted? :banana:

Thanks

Reg

[Ted S]

Well I didn't write the "Member Bots" hack so it would be wrong of me to steal and repurpose that code.

However, with just a little copying and pasting you can pull out the part used to determine if a visitor is indeed a bot and if so, you would not show them the welcome ehader's hack. This can all be done using the two plugins combined into one file.

I'd be glad to help more as needed.

And btw, I'm not actually a coder either. I'm a marketing consultant who happens to able to take a guess at that wierd php stuff.

[zurv]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Well I didn't write the "Member Bots" hack so it would be wrong of me to steal and repurpose that code.

However, with just a little copying and pasting you can pull out the part used to determine if a visitor is indeed a bot and if so, you would not show them the welcome ehader's hack. This can all be done using the two plugins combined into one file.

I'd be glad to help more as needed.

And btw, I'm not actually a coder either. I'm a marketing consultant who happens to able to take a guess at that wierd php stuff.

lol, and we appreciate the guess's you made to create this great hack. I think this is something we all need to look into, or maybe even talk to the "Bots as Members" creator to see if we could integrate the two and have a second version for this hack.

The problem also lies with.... Most search engines like to take the first text they see on a page as their "description". This means that a lot of your pages will have the same "Hello Guest" description. Instead of something related to the content on THAT page.