how do you keep your users engaged?

andrewjs18

how do you keep your users engaged on your forum? what extensions do you use? what strategies do you have in place?

andrewjs18

bumping this to prevent opening a new topic on this.

what do you do on your flarum forum to keep your user base engaged? what extensions do you use to simplify this? what techniques/ideas do you use?

andrewjs18

dang..no one?

how do you keep your users motivated and engaged on the site: @Capybara, @Silvestrus, @Tutrix, @ernestdefoe, @navindra

Silvestrus

andrewjs18 Good question! There is only so much you can do as an owner or admin. I feel that my role as an admin is successful if I provide a good, stable platform with features that members actually like. The other part is being a good moderator, preventing personal conflicts and keeping a healthy atmosphere on the forum by not allowing certain tricky topics to take over, like politics or sports. 😅

If you're lucky, you'll have members who create quality content for the forum. That is probably the biggest factor in overall forum quality - members who participate regularly and contribute something meaningful.

If you want to go the extra mile, I would suggest maintaining a blog or having some kind of daily discussion, like my "Albums released on today's date" topic. Something that gives people a reason to come back and something to write about every day.

But no matter how much you try as one person, that alone is not enough. You need a community. Without a community, a forum will usually fail. I do have one, but it is relatively small because my forum is very niche.

My main question is actually how to convert regular guests into members. I still don't know... I've added various CTAs for guests and tried to explain clearly what membership brings, but my conversion rate is still miserable. 😅

Silvestrus

And one more thing... The age of forums is probably behind us. Social networks have taken over.

For example, a similar Facebook group has around 13,000 members, while my forum has about 200. That's a huge difference.

devnull

It's tricky these days compared to the 'glory days'. I've been running forums since the early 00s and it's no longer a case of installing a forum script, throwing it online and watching the members come.

Realistically, 99% of guests won't convert. But if you get that 1% that appear, hang around and post regularly - keep them engaged. Participate in discussions, open new threads if some haven't appeared for a while.

My 'current' forum project has been open since 2019, ranks very well on google for its niche but new members are relatively rare. It's on XenForo and as much as I love Flarum I'm reluctant to change platform as this can quite easily upset the few regular members I have.

I'm also going to be starting a new Flarum forum soon-ish so that will also be a challenge to build from nothing, but that potentially will have wings as well as other forums in its niche are slowly getting bought up by Vertical Scope and usually sites die shortly thereafter.

Capybara

Honestly, I don't think launching a popular niche forum in 2026 is really possible anymore. Support forums are still hanging in there, though.

I already had an audience before Flarum, so I just moved it over from the old forum to the new one. There's barely anyone truly new coming in, but the banner exchange thing still works — yeah, that same trick straight out of the 2000s.

I've got Yandex Metrica hooked up, so I can see exactly how retention's doing, where people click, and the forum's blind spots. I can also see where my guests are coming from. Just added a widget to the homepage recently to help with retention

CyberGene

I think the Internet forum as a concept is kind of dead, people nowadays are on social networks. I maintain a small piano oriented forum and my impression is a lot of the audience is over 40. I grew up with forums and have spent unhealthy amount of time on piano, music, photography and car forums but even I abandoned most of them and use only my own forum lately.

navindra

@andrewjs18 I agree with @Silvestrus. If it's up to the admin to continue generating content and keeping the community engaged and motivated, then you've probably already failed. It's not sustainable and doesn't work. You can provide the platform, you can set some guidelines, you can provide support, you can provide features, you can generate ideas, but it generally has to be with the engagement of the community.

However, the forum and community needs to be it's own living thing in some sense. It shouldn't just be an extension of a single person's personality and opinions. I had many ideas for PianoTell that were rejected by the community that I just had to abandon. Sometimes I stop myself from jumping in and instead let things evolve without me. Otherwise I might as well just create a personal blog.

For PianoTell specifically, it's pretty challenging when we aren't even listed on Google.

Capybara

navindra we aren't even listed on Google

Why?

Capybara

Also, I want to back up two points from above: that an admin shouldn't be an entertainment unit, and that unique content from a loyal audience is your real core for growth.

A lot of news portals run on just 5-6 active news writers. Imagine your forum having that same handful of incredibly dedicated users who really know their stuff. Honestly, that beats 200 randomly registered newbies who post once a month

Karl

Just whatever you do, don’t sell out to VerticalScope.

navindra

Capybara Why?

It's more of a question for Google than me, unfortunately. My guess is that working search for the Internet is not a priority for them at this point. Everyone is busy with AI now.

Silvestrus

I have a fantastic SEO setup and still... only 11.9% of my traffic comes from Google. Honestly, I'm actually happy it's that high.

andrewjs18

I definitely agree with what everyone is saying so far, in that you first need to have a forum centered around a topic that'll generate traffic and discussions on its own. I guess the question though is that once you already have that established, how do you keep your users from wanting to leave to find another site - how do you keep them coming back and engaged?

for example, my site is 11 years old, has roughly _630k posts, almost 6,500 users and at one point, was receiving about 300,000-400,000 pageviews/month and nearing about 200 posts/day. I haven't checked what my pageviews are like these days, but I know my posts per day has been cut in half to around ₁₀₀ posts/day..sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. It is also summer here in America, so more people are away on vacations and spending more time out of the house... We also have more competition in my niche space now than we did a few years ago...although some of the larger sites have closed up shop over the past 2-3 years..

how have you removed friction on your site to encourage easy engagement with users, converted guests into active users and made good ui/ux decisions so that the site flows well? is your site gamified for achievements (your profile is fully filled out, you have 100 posts, etc., etc.)? do you send out a weekly/monthly digest? when someone registers on your site, do you send them a welcome email?

my current site on mybb is not gamified at all, nor do I send out a monthly digest to look back on what it going on. I plan on changing this once on flarum as there's extensions that are modern to help with this. which ones do you like and use to achieve this, if you currently do this on your site.

just brainstorming some ideas here...