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Using fake member activity on your forum (1 Viewer)

Cedric

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What do you think of admins who use the "fake member" concept on their forum to mimic activity?
 
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Not a fan of it, tbh. I feel like it cheapens the experience. Seen this on some forums, and decided not to join them cause of it.
 
It’s deceiving, I think. I want to know the true stats of the forum and not something masked by coding.
 
I am not a fan of fake member activity if I am honest. I feel it makes the activity look too forced and in most cases that can be seen in the quality of the posts that are made. I would rather spend time building up a community on a forum and having genuine activity on my forum over forcing it.
 
One of the things a forum stands on is trust and nothing strips you of a people's trust then going out of your way to deceive the very people whose trust you need if you plan on your forum going anywhere.
 
I mean I can understand why if it's in the newer stages and you're new to owning boards and you want to "pretend" have so many X members to try to encourage other people to join. When you're brand new, it can also be hard to get the board off the ground because people complain "omg no one is talking" or "omg there's no activity in XYZ areas on the board".
 
I can understand why people do it, especially if there is a lull, but I don't think it's a good idea as you'll end up with a lot of dead accounts.
Also don't know how people can keep up with having multiple forum personalities!

You're much better off finding individuals or resource boards who offer posting packages if you would like to increase activity.
 
I view it as cheating. Your not being honest about how active your forum actually is and your just making conversations boring.
 
I try to avoid it myself. It doesn't feel right and as others have said, sometimes you might be tempted to do so to help encourage activity or new content. Most of the time, it just turns into a few short replies because you can't respond to preferences or polls in more ways than one because it's still you doing the reply.
 
Some of the current biggest and most successful forums online used fake members, fake activity until they was able to get real members and real activity. The ole "fake it til you make it". So I guess it's a choice between no activity at all, which is really bad or fake activity.But I also think just making up things to fill space as an admin isn't too appealing either.
 
I dislike fake members, and I feel it would be easy to get caught out because it wouldn't be hard to notice a trend that the fake accounts are active around the same time as each other and the admin account, unless you went to the effort of setting up a schedule to put on a convincing front that everyone is a real, independent person when it comes to their online activity.
 
What do you think of admins who use the "fake member" concept on their forum to mimic activity?
I'm very sure that on the long run, the forum admin won't fool the real members on his forum forever. They will eventually find out and most of them will most likely quit the community because it's based on a lie.
 

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