This concerns me...

Half Evil

Golden Master
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16,076
When I give a link, just notices the members on at any given time.


This is what we look like.....
http://computerforums.org

This is what we will look like with another 30,000 members......
http://www.caraudioforum.com/vbb3/index.php?

This is what we should look like here soon....
http://www.caraudio.com/forum/index.php


See, we have 20,000 some odd members, and look like the first forum with 50,000 some odd members.

See, the new avatars have helped, but we need more then that to keep attention towards us. I mean, compare the two other forums. one has 10,000 more members, and has 1/3 of the people of the other forum on at any given time.

Why? Because it looks fun, and is customizable, I mean I really hate beating things out of david, but im still worried about the forum.

I am afraid that we will end up like the first link.... 50,000 members, and still only 20 on at any given time.

However, with the second link, and everything customizable, there can be over 200 on at any given time.

New template for the forum (or at least choices)
And new smilies are two more things we should consider.

Thoughts?
 
Yes, more is better. Also more manpower too. More mods and perhaps a second admin, should the forum grow even bigger. This forum can expand even greater if done right. Maybe even add a photo gallery or something instead of posting photos in a stickied thread. It's kind of ghetto the way we have it now, but whatever works I guess. Underneath each photo will have a brief descritption of who posted the image and comment. People can comment the photo after it's uploaded.

The ability to have a homepage is pretty nice too, which links to the forums here. It's probably a lot more to maintain because someone will need to keep up with articles and news. But it looks sweet. I wouldn't mind doing something like that.

Customer signatures is another nice add, with limitations and restrictions enforced by admin and mods (this is a must because this can get out of hand easily).

Those are just some thoughts.
 
I have had a quick look at the Members List.

On the first page alone, literally everyone joined in 2004 and have had no posts whatsoever. They are all variations of the same user name, I think this may have been some kind of bot or automated script. I have no way of getting the exact numbers in terms of such accounts but I feel it could stretch into the thousands.

I have used the vBulletin Administrator Control Panel before some years ago when helping out a friend, and I remember an option whereby you can prune user accounts. Why not just delete everyone with zero posts using this? It was also possible to run custom SQL queries using the same Control Panel, and using this will offer further flexibility in what data gets removed.

Seeing as these accounts stretch back well over three years and have never posted once, I would happily bet a small sum of money on them never ever returning and becoming full time members. These accounts should be purged in my opinion, for two reasons:

1) Having the same number of active members but lowering the number of total members makes this site look more successful, busy and active; having 37 out of 6000 members online looks better than 14 out of 22 000, out of these 22 000 about 5000 (at a rough guess) have never ever posted and joined years ago

2) The site database is no doubt bloated to some extent with these unused accounts; pruning these accounts will keep it more manageable and take up less space on the server, as well as making access times faster due to having to check fewer rows when searching etc.

3) As they have never posted it will do no harm to the integrity of the actual table containing posts from members and it will, as such, not inadvertantly disrupt the flow of any older threads dating from the same era that people may stumple across.

Obviously this is just my opinion, but if I was running this forum or a forum of similar size it is definitely something I would at least consider.
 
^ agreed.. it would make it alot tidier.. if we prune everyone who hasnt posted within six months of joining, it would clean it up alot..
 
When I give a link, just notices the members on at any given time.


This is what we look like.....
http://computerforums.org

This is what we will look like with another 30,000 members......
http://www.caraudioforum.com/vbb3/index.php?

This is what we should look like here soon....
http://www.caraudio.com/forum/index.php


See, we have 20,000 some odd members, and look like the first forum with 50,000 some odd members.

See, the new avatars have helped, but we need more then that to keep attention towards us. I mean, compare the two other forums. one has 10,000 more members, and has 1/3 of the people of the other forum on at any given time.

Why? Because it looks fun, and is customizable, I mean I really hate beating things out of david, but im still worried about the forum.

I am afraid that we will end up like the first link.... 50,000 members, and still only 20 on at any given time.

However, with the second link, and everything customizable, there can be over 200 on at any given time.

New template for the forum (or at least choices)
And new smilies are two more things we should consider.

Thoughts?
Jeez that was something else, an actual live link to Car Audios.com & see what members were discussing, it was weird, at first I thought it was fictional but no, it was interactive, did anyone else notice this???....how did you do that??:eek:
 
IMO, a big reason why a lot of people don't join is because of the amount of posts that the majority of the regulars have. We're almost all gurus and have posts in the thousands or over ten thousand. There is a similar forum that I like but I won't join it for that reason.
One of the members said that CF is too cliquey and i agree. A lot of the members know eachother by name and such and that immediately makes the forums uninviting to newcomers who want to fit in. If you ask me, the forums are on an unpreventable downhill trend. I would be surprised to see CF ever turn that around and things pick up.
It's just our overall presence is uninviting and I don't think avatars, signatures, custom interfaces or whatever is going to fix that.
 
well i think with a majority of members who join here, they join because they have a certain question or problem they want help with, and after they've had that help or solved their problem they don't come back as regular members simply because they don't want to.

Meanwhile, other new members may come here with a question, then find that they like the place for the people etc and deice to come back as frequent members.

So i think IMO most people who don't stay, don't stay because they came to have their questions answered and no more.

Hence the endless amounts of users who joined perhaps some while ago and have only 3-4 posts each.

:)
 
I always go by the moto, if its not broken dont fix it. But having said that you do have a point

There are the same amount of people browsing the forums these days as there were back in my day
 
there is a problem. we use to have 300+ member viewing at pretty much any given time, we have more member viewing, but way less guests, ive seen it go down to 60 late at night for the US
 
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