how to get more members?

• advertise! (cost $ though, which can be a problem).
• Submit to search engines (im sure youve done this already)
• word of mouth
• sig file in all your outgoing emails and corrospondence
• mass mail post cards (cost $ of course)
• flyers
• business cards
• visit other forums and have your forum link in your sig file!
• contact mac usergroups and spread the word to them!
• visit places on the web where other mac users are (chat rooms, forums, ebay, etc) and get the word out.

Some of these ideas cost $, some don't. They ALL require time and effort.

Well, I've been thinking about this a little. I can definately start some banner exchange stuff going, but that will require some graphics work. Which I can do, but i also have a full-time job to take care of as well. If any of you wish to make a banner that is cool, animated, and looks sharp, I'd be glad to make use of it. There has been one contribution already that I have seen, so maybe that person can work on updating it. But i think banner exchange will be the best 'free' solution for the time being.

These forums already rank to the top of a google search.

I'm not too big on going to other forums and basically spamming them with advertisements for this place. I do however understand that advertising for other forums is usually permitted in signatures. So I guess that is something to do, post to more forums.

How big do u want the banner?

Banner exchanges use 468x60 with an 18K file size. Some require a 14K file size. So I would say go with 14K.

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more to come later, but sleep first...

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I like both of those. The jaguar one is cool.

Been looking at banner ads for the majority of the day, and it seems that there aren't any out there that are Mac related that are just banner ads. Most of them are for-profit click-thru's which will not benefit us at all. If you know of an Apple/Mac banner ad program that is still in existance, please let me know.

number #2.. and once again its wayyyyy past my bedtime...

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You can upload images directly to the board now.... No need to host them on your own. If you wish, of course...

By the way, I like that last one.... These are all good efforts. I just need to find a good banner ad site.....

Possibly you could add things other than forums. Some ideas: A gallery where people can post images, a mac news site (could be the homepage), a chat - there are free php scripts that will do that. Sure it would be a lot of work, but not if done in little bits, spread over a wide group of people working on it. I'm sure that most members here that have experience in web design and coding would be happy to help maintain the pages, including myself. You need more activity - when a visitor visits, if the 'latest' posts are about a week old they're not encouraged to post anything because they see it as unlikely that they will get a prompt reply. So that poses a problem - to get more members, you have to have more members to post <_< Its a great interface, and from what I've seen, has friendly members. Try to have an admin or moderator online at all times to answer questions and edit out bad posts. Thats probably not a problem right now, but as membership increases so will the danger of spammers, unpleasant people and the like.

whenever im on a computer at work or at home (usually about 60-70% of my day) i always have the View New Posts window open to see whats going on, and check on it every so often. I do this out of boredom usually, but I can keep a watchful eye while I'm at it

Well, we are getting a few posts per day, and there is times when there are multiple people on at a time . As for adding things to the site....

I have thought about adding a portal, and I just don't wanna deal with it. I started Mac-Forums.com because I wanted to focus on a community without basically repeating what every other site has reported. I have no problem with links to other places for latest news and all that stuff, I just don't find it necessarry to carbon-copy everything on the net.

I want to add a gallery to the board, but unfortunetly, there isn't an easy way to do this, and it would involve a great deal of time. I am willing to spend that time, I just have not found a satisfactory solution yet. So, that is definately in the works.

I've also thought about adding an IRC server. But that sorta defeats the purpose of having an archive of information in the forums. I will still probably implement this, but again, I haven't found the software I wanna use, and I haven't gotten too far into this. The gallery is most important right now.

Please feel free to comment about this, as I would definately like your imput into what and where the board should be. I just have a few things that I don't really want to budge on right now.

Thanks for your time....

a chat on the forum would take away from the posting aspect. posting allows you to read all the comments and fully reply, where as a chat is pretty instant and debating topics or getting tech support isnt as thorough. an IRC channel wouldn't be a bad idea though. Either creating an IRC client or using one to access a Mac-forums.com channel would be pretty good.

I could probably implement a java based chat client to integrate with the board. But it would also be a full fledged IRC server, so you would be able to log in with any IRC client. But again, this is down the road. I have looked into it, and I don't want to compromise the security of my server for something that is superflous.

The java based chat would be a good idea, but I can see how much work that would be to set it up. You could try looking at PHP Resource I think they might have some scripts for image galleries and the like... not sure though. What about utilising rss feeds for news in little boxes?