How to increase users activities in forum

[techcubetalk]

Hi,

I've a programming site TechCuBe Talk which is tech oriented site. It has a very good forum. But what I found people are not using it actively. Can anyone suggest me how to increase this?

[ryanhellyer]

Nice forum design you have there.

The best way to get people talking in your forum is to actively participate yourself. If no one is using it, then start talking to yourself. If you have to, you could even register another username and start talking to yourself that way, so that it looks like there are multiple people involved. It's a little sneaky but can help.

I run a forum for my local ice hockey club, and I find that by constantly starting new topics and adding to those topics over time I can generate a lot of conversation. I can't use fake usernames there since the users know each other in real life, so creating fake people wouldn't work there, but on most forums it seems to work okay.

There are paid forum posting services, but the quality of posts is usually apalling. If you want to go down the paid posting route, I recommend recruiting users yourself, that way you can make sure you have posters who are knowledgeable in the forum topic rather than random one-off posters who give their fives posts before going off to post in an entirely different topic forum.

[Dean-123]

Start some interesting topics will attract the users to take part in the talk and increase their activity.

[ryanhellyer]

Yep, starting your own topics helps a lot.

The problem is getting people to reply of course! You don't want a bunch of topics with no responses. I try to concentrate on creating topics which people are likely to reply to. The occasional controversial one helps a lot. People are a lot more likely to reply to controversial posts than non-controversial ones.