Out of interest, now the migration is pretty much over. Are we still growing?

I removed links from "other places" from my favourites as there is just no activity there. However I wondered if we are still growing here? Do we have ways to attract new membership?

(Sorry if this has been asked before)

Well user numbers are slowly increasing but loads don't post anything.

I'm not sure if trying to poach old users from the other place is practical, most activity seems to be in the news/ comments section ( which will always be our weakness as they have staff doing it ) I suspect they will lose most other traffic to other forums.

How we go about attracting traffic not really sure to be honest with you.

On the help sections we have more than enough knowledge to handle virtually anything, the meeting pace well that's where its at end of. but attracting users ..........

Just a though how about an instructions thread where we ask new users to say hello etc. Try to make them welcome and start to post.

There always used to be a thing on the old forums where if somebody was a post from a new user they would always make a thing about welcoming them to the forums etc.

230 users 78 1 or less posts

Mark said the same thing a week or so ago:

There's a link here from my plaice which gets a few hits, although I think they're mostly just Redeyes and KW

I think the important thing is to design the homepage to be truly meaningful. Once we have an obvious raison d'etre which folks can read and understand, then we can decide what keywords to let Google find and generate traffic.

This site is indexed already on Google, but for some reason only the main indexes and the rules thread. Is there a robots killing the spiders, or did someone submit those pages?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:h ... x404.co.uk

I've got a link in my Bit-Tech sig.

We need to forget about attracting new users. Instead, concentrate on producing some good content in the rest of the x404 site (and here on the forums too of course).

If that is cracked, then the user base will just happen on it's own.

So the question isn't "how do we get more users" the question is "what content do we want to produce?"

It's just easier than bookmarking.

It's actually quite funny. I looked at the "online users location" bit, and it said "Redeyes: X404.co.uk" ... but it still shows as if you're on mine. Well, it tickled me anyway



For once, I agree with the grumpy old man.

Exactly, content is important, and it doesn't have to be just external to the forums, if you find something really interesting and something that might help people, post it up, if it can be indexed it will drag people in (as you said). Things like the Leopard tips thread is good for this...

Well, I can't speak for other Dennis Publishing sites, but I accessed PC Pro the other day and it's dead over there. Of course, I am a CPC reader and seldom accessed through PCPro (except when the CPC Gerbil was having a day off), but without the crowd that have clearly deserted, there's very little going on.

I looked at the membership and there are quite a few registered since the forums were revised, but out of about 100, they don't appear to have much over ten posts between them, while the old membership has left the sinking ship.

No doubt some have decided to call it a day, but it's clear that a lot have migrated here and the numbers are creeping up. To keep people here, it's clear that we are going to have to build on what we already have and that means content.

I would suggest that the overwhelming reason for many of us coming here was the Meeting Place, but for those new to the community, it's not going to be enough. As the user base grows, the help available from the members' knowledge will increase greatly and that will attract and keep members, but at the moment, the general forums- TMP, Photography and the like are the most active- probably not what many former Dennis members are looking for when they join.