How do you increase forum contents?

[temi]

The most obvious ways to increase contents for a forum is naturally to start more threads but how do you stimulate this if your members are not starting many new threads?

[OldWelshGuy]

temi, this is a great question, and one that only a really busy forum owner can answer. The simple answer is to get more members! More members will start more threads. On my rugby forum, we have about 20 members who start threads on a regular basis, although they all join in with them.

I honestly believe that one of the reasons for the success of my rugby forum was that I started with just 3 forums on the board. I increased them/split them only when deman made it a need. I have also canvassed the membership regularly as to what they would like to see happen/added/removed etc.

[temi]

Excellent tip OWG, I also think part of the success of your rugby forum is the fact that people are passionate about the subject, they are not trying to get cheap backlinks or sell stuff. But for a webmaster forum its slighly different, the passion cannot match that from a sports forum

[OldWelshGuy]

I have to admit that a lot of the passion has gone from the forums, but more because they have been filtered down. In the early years when we first had web forums, we were ALL passionate about it so the debates rolled on. Nowadays there are so many wannabbees spouting rubbish and setting up their own forums when they know absolutely nothing about the industry they are involved in, that the quality of content is often crap (does not apply to here though).

[betias]

One of the first thread I started in my forum was entitled "launching this forum". Here I asked members for recommendations and suggestions. As each person asked for new forums or sub-forums, I challenged and invited them to post regularly in that forum. It seem to have worked well. As a matter of fact I tend to have more new threads than posts when I create these new forums.