Re:Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse
by CM30 on Wednesday May 03, 2017 @05:20AM
(#14254139)
Yeah, 100% this. For signatures, it's also (in a lot of cases) because people see the signature backlink as a 'reward' for using the community. Like "if I post content on a regular basis, you'll let me link back to my own site/social media presence in my signature".
This itself causes some issues (like with spammers joining simply for the 'SEO' benefits), but it's enough of a pattern that changing it will often kill a forum dead, especially in the webmaster/tech/marketing field.
Other things that encourage members (but that are often seen as clutter) include reputation systems (like the green bars vBulletin had), forum cash (points given for posts and other actions), fictional shop items (purchased with said forum cash), etc. Again, a lot of people on these forums rather like said systems and often find them useful, even if to an outsider that might be seen as overwhelming.
This itself causes some issues (like with spammers joining simply for the 'SEO' benefits), but it's enough of a pattern that changing it will often kill a forum dead, especially in the webmaster/tech/marketing field.
Other things that encourage members (but that are often seen as clutter) include reputation systems (like the green bars vBulletin had), forum cash (points given for posts and other actions), fictional shop items (purchased with said forum cash), etc. Again, a lot of people on these forums rather like said systems and often find them useful, even if to an outsider that might be seen as overwhelming.