Hobby & Craft Forums

Would it be possible to let non registered guests, see enough of our forum to whet their appetite to join, but not everything until registered?

Also, once registered, if members have not posted after a set period of time, 3 months for example -could their status revert to guest?

This is a good idea, otherwise the member list gets longer and longer and some people only join for a short time.

Carolee Crafts wrote:This is a good idea, otherwise the member list gets longer and longer and some people only join for a short time.

or just take away our brilliant ideas and contribute nothing!

Telling me, but this happens at fairs as well, in fact I had two women about 3 years ago stand blocking my stall and actually discuss how they would make one of my items to sell, they then had the nerve to ask me where I sourced my materials from, my reply "spending hours online trawling through suppliers" they were not happy but at least they moved on. Also on another 'forum' I had blogged one of my makes and about 2 months later another member posted a pic of almost the same thing on the forum and everyone was saying how brilliant it was!!!!! Mind you I suppose this could be classed as flattery and also sad that they were unable to come up with their own ideas.

I tried logging in as if I was an unregistered guest the other night from my laptop just to see what they can see before they sign up and I think Shaun's had a fiddle with the settings and they can now see every forum and have a read through the posts before they decide to join or not!

I'm not sure if it's possible to have registered users converted back to guest after they've registered and it might not be such a good idea to do this anyway. If you look at the other craft forum- where I met you rabble lol, they have over 35,000 members and since theres ever only likely to be a small percentage of these online at any given time (right now as I type they only have 28 members signed in and 53 guests) then it's best to keep the biggest membership list that we can to attract others. With most forums the amount of members is an attraction for new members- the more members, the more likley they'll get a response to their posts etc!

As for any ideas...once the forum starts being spidered by Google I'm going to put restrictions on the private forum so members have to have a certain amount of posts to view it so anything you want hidden from new members as well as the search engines should be put into that forum. I will make the post count a minimum of about 50 posts I think before registered users are allowed in which will hopefully also act as an incentive to contribute to the forum!

Nickie wrote: If you look at the other craft forum- where I met you rabble lol, they have over 35,000 members and since theres ever only likely to be a small percentage of these online at any given time (right now as I type they only have 28 members signed in and 53 guests) then it's best to keep the biggest membership list that we can to attract others. With most forums the amount of members is an attraction for new members- the more members, the more likley they'll get a response to their posts etc!

A number of those may be duplicates I am guessing.. people log in, register, forget details, change emails and so on..

I dont think the number of members is an issue though, well not directly.. it is the number of topics and posts I would have thought.. while that comes down to having enough folk to make them, I'd wager a bar of chocolate very few look up how many members are on a forum before signing up!

I am not sure how many people seek a forum before having a need either.. I certainly joined the last one because I couldn't find an answer to a problem.. and stayed.. I know I am not the typical crafter, but do folk really just spontaneously decide to join a craft forum?

Most people stumble across forums as opposed to purposely seeking them out Gordon- we obviously have the same type of thought pattern as I purposely searched for 'craft forum' when I found the other place but you can tell from the search volumes that we're defo in the minority specifically seeking a forum!

While I agree that topic and post counts are the most important, it's usually the amount of members that attract users as this is the first thing most people spot as well as how many people have visited in the past 24 hours on the homepage (assuming things are configured and shown in this way) and is much easier to spot than how many topics or posts people have made in a given time frame. This requires going into the actual forum which requires effort and time if you want to find out how active it is.

You're right when you say that people don't spontaneously join a craft forum and they're much the same as me and you in that they'll have a problem or difficulty they can't find answers to elsewhere but they are more likely to be searching for an answer in Google and stumble across a forum post than they are to actively search for a craft forum!