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How do you seed a brand-new online forum so it doesn't look like a "ghost town"?

· 2 weeks ago · 1 reply · 93

Starting a fresh online forum is one of the most painful things the webmasters face. Spending weeks setting up a forum and months after launching it, you are still having zero active members. Sometimes it's only you posting and commenting on your own post back and forth. If new visitors see an empty board with no discussions, they will never return. Do you secretly create multiple seed accounts to generate hot arguments yourself or you just hire writers to start fake threads?

1 reply

· 1 week ago

Posting with the caveat that I haven’t run a forum in a long time and will unlikely return to it. But if I were:

I would avoid creating seed accounts. I never did that back in the day and I consider it tacky. You will eventually be found out and how will your genuine members react to that? Look at this dud that only talks to themself. What if a member thought they’d found a friend, only to find out it was just an alias? It’s just a bad look.
I would also avoid AI accounts. People join forums to talk to people, they don’t want to talk to bots.
For actual content, I’d stick with post exchanges on forum owner websites and services like PostLoop. These are posts from real people, they’re not fake threads. A 5/5 thread exchange with a real person is a lot more valuable than spinning up a fake account and posting with that.
HOWEVER, I wouldn’t have this as the only source of content. Lets be real, people use these services because they want their forum to do well. It’s mutually beneficial, but they’re doing it for themselves. So I’d make it a priority to get people posting who aren’t in the forum sphere. The best people for this are your friends. Sometimes you can just ask them and they’ll pop in. Sometimes you can bribe them with beers or a fun activity. But you need to get people in who aren’t in the same group of 50 forum owners who are circling around the same forums, because they will never become your core members.
The real golden goose is SEO. However, this is something I never mastered.

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