Lurkers

andrewo · Founder Joined: 13 Jul 2007 Posts: 42 Location: Saddleworth

It has come to my notice and a few others on here that we have reached a half century with people using the forum BUT it still amazes me that we get so many lurkers. The other day I came on and there was 47 guests, all trawling around but not joining the forum. Many people work very hard to maintain this forum, put up news for you and wouldn't it be great if you actually joined, had a voice and bloody said something!

Troo · Joined: 16 Mar 2008 Posts: 18

Relax, Andrew. You get this with forums. Roughly 10% of regular visitors actually participate in discussions, no matter what the forum is about and how popular it is.

A great deal of lurkers are actually search engine bots that trawl the site and harvest data, which makes you more likely to turn up in a search when someone looks for words which appear in a thread here.

There's also a large percentage of forum users who are more than happy to read the forums but not take part in them, and while it's frustrating as a forum administrator, those people derive just as much enjoyment from visiting as the posters do.

So fear not. At least your work is being appreciated Smile

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Trudi Topham,
Editor, Pantechnicon.
Editor, Hub.

Moderator · Site Admin Joined: 05 Jan 2007 Posts: 582

It happens but we have taken on what Roy suggested and have opened a number of forums to the public, that way they don't have to be members. Forums always take along time to build up but we will get there, appreciate the frustration from Andrew and the kind words from Troo.