By Pushkar Gaikwad on

Well I want to know what can I do in my site to make the members participate and post more. I have enabled the point system but really, no one is that stupid to make posts just for "points" :)

Can someone tell me about few modules which can help me on this. I don't think I will be using adsense revenue for the moment, anything else ?

Thanks alot

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

bwv’s picture

bwv commented

In my experience, content, ease of navigation, content, overall design, and content are what bring people to a site, but not necessarily in that order.

You could try the quiz module, perhaps? Or post a poll now and then to generate discussions.
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iandickson’s picture

iandickson commented

I even attended conferences on the subject....

Basically the tech part is easy to get right, if current tool deliver the required functionsality.

The real issue is all about psychology and behavior, and WIIFM - What's In It For Me? You are asking people for effort, and they don't give that easily.

All you can do is work and develop and build, and work to build audience - because if there is one thing that encourages participation, it's believing that your stuff will actually be seen by an appreciative audience. If we just want to talk to ourselves, we can blog....

Good luck.

Ian Dickson

Likal.com

Drupalace-1’s picture

Drupalace-1 commented

p123,

Excellent topic. I have a related post at http://www.drupalace.com/questions/how_encourage_readers_share_content

It's a little tangential, focusing on how to make participation-related *links* more visible, but may be of small interest to you.

The big-picture answer for spurring participation will be 1) lower barriers and 2) increase rewards. My post above is a small peek at 1); I remain interested in any additional ideas. As for 2), all I can do is agree with other comments here: fascinating content and participants are the key reward awaiting any potential user – far more effective, if you can swing it, than point systems etc.

I know my site is sure in need of more fascinating content! Well, that's what 2008 is for...

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A site by, of, and for the Drupal beginner: http://www.drupalace.com

kxerc’s picture

kxerc commented

Great topic. Everyone hit the highlights already in terms of good content (perhaps even unique content), ease of use, focus, etc. Clearly you have to treat user contributed sites (forums, wiki, comments, evals, etc.) much differently than information, 'brochure', and commerce web sites. This means spending some time thinking about the community you have now and the community you want to have and then charting a course for the forum or other interactive / contributed portion of the site. Do not build today the forum you want to have in a year. It will be too heavy and most likely die. To this end I would recommend you do some back of the envelop math which involves number of users, time you know they spend on your site or think they might spend, frequency with which content / information updates in the community (not the contributed portion), plus an estimated percent of posts over a given period of time per user. What you want to do is realistically figure out how many subsections to a forum or wiki or whatever exist. I'd figure it takes at least 150 semi-active users (3-5 visits a week) to support a forum subsection -- that is a topic area beyond the typical help, announcement, etc. This is assuming you have something of interest to post in the announcements, etc. or otherwise something happens in the community worth reporting at least once per week. For every week that goes by without a significant community update or topic for discussion, then double your users. I say this because without such updates your site will get redundant very quickly with users asking the same question or expressing the same thought. Too much redundancy and people leave. The exception to all of this is if the community already exists and is already a 'club' of some flavor or dealing with a very (VERY) unique topic. Then you can slum in the 20-50 user range as the community is already primed to talk, perhaps even know each other, and because of the exclusiveness by topic or 'membership' there is no where else to go for such a discussion. So my point is when you are starting don't have 12 different sub-topics for discussion if you don't have the users yet -- just start with one or two max until you get to a few hundred users or are lucky enough to have a few dozen users that are quite active. Also, you can figure that 1 'moderator' / really active user is worth about 10 normal users. My end point is that nothing turns a new user away from an entire forum and site like seeing a dead area -- if a forum topic is DOA, the user will likely think your site is as well. To this end you might try to generate some forum posts with selected users -- pay them or appoint them as moderator or whatever -- to prime the 'discussion pump' when you first start. Even if you have to have a 'forced' discussion, it is best to start this way.

Anyway, my 2 cents.