How long did it take to get a solid amount of Members?

[Rampensau]

How long did it take to get a solid amount of Members? What did you do for it? Just Luck or did you placements?

 

[Paul]

Luck because we moved from another place which was closing.

 

[Cory]

I usually gain over a page of new members every month, but being 5+ years old I don't remember how fast I originally started gaining members, I'm sure it took time to build up a decent-sized member base. Being a resource board, I think the more resources my board has available the more likely I am to gain new members. Plus, when you first start it can take a while to promote the board enough for it to gain noticeability and traction.

 

[Empire]

Can take years but as long as you have a group of nice active supportive members that all I care about

 

[Kale]

My Harvest Moon forum: It took I recall like 1-2 months for there to be solid amount of users who joined the site and then some joined our small little RP forum section. Fun times, fun times.

 

[Reverie]

Reaching out to previous friends and communities helped. It has typically taken me a week to get a good amount of members but it's also because I ran general communites. I think niche specific it could take more like a month to get a good beginning. My first milestone was always 50 members joined, but then the next milestone is to have 10 members online at the same time and posting for majority of the day.

 

[Kale]

Reaching out to previous friends and communities helped. It has typically taken me a week to get a good amount of members but it's also because I ran general communites. I think niche specific it could take more like a month to get a good beginning. My first milestone was always 50 members joined, but then the next milestone is to have 10 members online at the same time and posting for majority of the day.

In my own case back in like 2010 or so the entire niche/genre of Harvest Moon was just starting to have other sites and/or forums of it shut down. Some were/are long standing communities, and figured I'd shoot my shot with it finally. A lot closed down due to lack of interest in the games, or people were just growing up and moving onto other things. I did so on phpBB3 and maybe like MyBB and/or SMF. Then my co-admin said she knew ZB/IF stuff better, so we moved to it.

We did better on ZetaBoards overall, but then my own IRL and the co-admins IRL were hectic and busy at the time. I worked usually 3-4 days a week part-time at a retail chain, and it was taking it's toll on me mentally and somewhat physically. The co-admins reason I don't recall as it was all over MSN and not the forum itself.

I think nowadays doing a general farm and life sim forum would sound cool and interesting, but I again think it'd be a rough niche/genre when there's subreddits and Discords for like direct ones nowadays.

 

[Ravenfreak]

With my most successful forum it didn't take too long after the game was announced to get a good number of members. I had a Mighty No. 9 forum and it launched to the public before the official forums launched, plus the official forums originally was only available to those backed the game on Kickstarter, and I think that helped at first. But I feel like once the official forums opened to the public I had less and less members join.

 

[NeoMetallix]

I don't have a problem getting people to sign up, my biggest problem is keeping active members.

On the old forum we had thousands of members and tons that signed up and made less than five posts.

 

[Uncrowned]

Still working on this part 😅

 

[Jay™]

It depends on the niche, really; when I was gaming back in the day, my site was only up for weeks with over 400 active donating members; today, it's a different story on forums today; getting members is the easy part; however, keeping them engaged is not so easy.

It's still fun building.

 

[Cory]

On the old forum we had thousands of members and tons that signed up and made less than five posts.

I have just about 1600 members on my board and probably about 95% of them haven't even made a post because they come for the resources and then leave apparently.

 

[Darth Cognus]

I have just about 1600 members on my board and probably about 95% of them haven't even made a post because they come for the resources and then leave apparently.

A very typical effect for communities with something to offer. Always expect a minority to engage, and a minority of that to remain engaged. This is why I don't take member counts very seriously, they just indicate roughly how long and how widely a community has been exposed to the public eye. Not to mention spam creations...

 

[Cory]

Not to mention spam creations...

Thankfully, I've had very little spam on my board. I've only had to ban three members for spamming and they were gone after one or two posts when I immediately knew they were there to spam and nothing more. I do remember on my old board back in the days of InvisionFree we had spam bots/members register every day, especially during the nighttime. We probably had hundreds of these spam bots/members at the time. Thankfully, spambots are more and more a thing of the past with registration security being beefed up these days.

 

[JennyorAlice]

I've had my blog for 5 years now (just celebrated it's 5 year anniversary) and it's take me that long to get to 236 followers. I have doubled how many followers I have every year that I've been open except this last year.

I will take suggestions on how to gain more members if anyone is willing to offer any......

 

[Shortie]

I remember when I had Chat Addicts the very first version from 2009 - 2017 when I had to close due to the hosting sky-rocketing by quite a lot and me choosing to move to something else for a while, it was slow and steady but the more content I posted and the more I promoted, the more new members I got over time.

When I decided to close it, it was running steadily with active members daily. I now regret closing it but at the same time, I was burnt out and the hosting price increasing pushed me to try something different at the time.

 

[Nomad]

Currently, I am running two forums and I have less than 50 members. My forums are almost two years old, so you can understand I am not very good at attracting members.

 

[Tracy]

There is a difference between getting "members" and getting participating members....
I have a lot of members.. but very few of them participate on the site. Many of them thought that they had to sign up to download resources that are available to any guest user (yes, I run my site for myself and offer the benefit of it to others for free).

 

[Arantor]

Many of them thought that they had to sign up to download resources

So many other sites do this that it has long since become normalised.

 

[Tracy]

So many other sites do this that it has long since become normalised.

Yes... and that's an issue between trying to FORCE participation/activity and then giving benefits freely.
Some of us continue to desire to offer knowledge to others and we don't "crow" about it.