Philosophical Vegan Forum

Hi everyone, wanted to get some feedback from forum members on how to encourage more activity on the forum. We have over 70 members, yet most content comes from a dozen or so users, while the large majority have not even posted a single comment or topic.

There are a lot of great threads already started, and many of them are getting old with little or no interaction from the forum members. I would encourage everyone to look back at older topics and see if we can bring some life into them.

Also, please feel free to create new topics, suggest ways to encourage more participation, and overall create a better community.

Thanks in advance.

I think one of the main problems is that there is a lacking of theists on the forums. The majority seem to be atheist and that means there are very few opportunities to engage in an interesting discussion. I think it is more balanced on the diet aspect as many of the atheist members are not vegan. Unfortunately I am not sure how you would encourage more theists to join...

TheVeganAtheist wrote:Hi everyone, wanted to get some feedback from forum members on how to encourage more activity on the forum. We have over 70 members, yet most content comes from a dozen or so users, while the large majority have not even posted a single comment or topic.

Membership does not normally equal participation. Have you heard of the 90-9-1 principle?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_ ... t_culture)



In part, it's normal. With only 70 users, it's kind of unusual to have even one active poster. Here there are three, and yourself. And then three more who post more intermittently. You're above the curve so far, but you need to do more to encourage posting by new members (and reply more fully and thoughtfully to some posts, even if you can't think of much to say).

Communityspark has some articles on that, and other subjects, and suggestions for beating the trend:

http://www.communityspark.com/why-are-a ... gold-dust/


Do you notice how I try to ask questions in my posts?
Welcome posts, particularly, are the most important time to engage and convert a user to a regular poster.

You can't make a habit of welcoming people like this: "Welcome ______, its great to have you on the forum."
Make sure they have something to reply to.

Aside from that, we need more members- because we need some theists to pop in to start arguments with.

Call them out in a youtube video or something.
Make video responses to popular theists on youtube, and call them out specifically, inviting them here to debate.

Great suggestions brimstoneSalad. I will definitely implement that in my next videos.

It isn't particularly going better, even though there are many more forum members now. Some fun conversations are far shorter than I would sometimes wish it to be. Maybe it's because rational people presenting rational arguments are easily in agreement, or maybe it's something else. Whatever the reason, I would love to have it more active.

Volenta wrote:Maybe it's because rational people presenting rational arguments are easily in agreement

Pretty much. I never find a hole in any of your guys' argumentation. Perhaps we should do some crazy hypothetical scenarios that deliver a situation none of us have ever thought about.

Volenta wrote:It isn't particularly going better, even though there are many more forum members now. Some fun conversations are far shorter than I would sometimes wish it to be. Maybe it's because rational people presenting rational arguments are easily in agreement, or maybe it's something else. Whatever the reason, I would love to have it more active.

Yeah, we probably need more irrational people here. Argument fizzles out pretty fast, and there aren't terribly many topics to argue about.

The most active theist here, DLH, is one of the less irrational theists (one of the least irrational I know of), and he won't argue about the things he's particularly and demonstrably wrong on (maybe he doesn't like to lose arguments?).

Advertising might draw in more theists to provide debate fodder.

miniboes wrote:Perhaps we should do some crazy hypothetical scenarios that deliver a situation none of us have ever thought about.

We could do that... but I tried that a few times, to not much reply. Maybe I covered the subjects too well.

Maybe we need somebody to play poe.

advertising where?

TheVeganAtheist wrote:advertising where?

Google could work.

Why not go on other related forum sites (theist forums, vegan forums, atheist forums, spiritual forums) create an account and post comments on similar active topics with a re direct link back to our forums
Or you could make an account on theist forums, pretend to be a concerned theist and say "wow these people on TVA forum are really crazy they don't believe in the Bible we must go on their forums to help convert them back! "
something along those lines