list of PP 'fails'

[PlaxMacaws]

I thought it might be interesting to post a list of the things we've tried that haven't worked well (or at all) as far as increasing forum participation and/or membership on this message board. Here they are:

1. Holding a competition with a high value prize giveaway ($500 gift card) - we had very low participation despite plenty of promotion ahead of time.

2. Creation of a Facebook fan page representing this website - FB users with birds typically will not come here and register.

3. Implementation of a chat/shout box for real-time conversation - most members seemingly have no interest in this.

4. Implementation of an IRC chat channel - this seemed somewhat popular at first but activity faded to nothing fairly soon.

5. Implementation of voice chat for PP members (via Zello) - virtually no members have shown interest in using the voice chat system.

6. Creation of certain focused bird-related groups (e.g., MOA) - I think our member base is too small here for groups to catch on and become active.

7. Implementation of a personal blog system - few members have shown interest in maintaining blogs here... my suspicion is that, as with the groups, we don't have enough active members to keep the blog section active.

8. Various forum software function additions and modifications for member convenience - these things can never really inspire greater participation and thus have nothing to do with how many active members we may or may not gain.

I'm sure there are a few more. But those are several off the top of my head. And by the way, the purpose of this post isn't necessarily to generate new ideas that may increase site participation. I'm mainly posting about this to show how difficult it is to build an active member base on a message board like this one. If anyone wants to comment, that's fine. If not, that's okay as well.

[Casper's 2nd best friend]

Keep up the good work, I don't do facebook or other social media, lots of people telling other people what they had for breakfast and dead people who want to be my friend. I'm just an old fuddy-duddy who realises that the younger generations do things differently to me.
Don't forget that your membership is global, with different time zones. So sometimes one person will be asleep when a question is asked and the other person will be asleep when they get the reply.

[PlaxMacaws]

Oh yes, I'll keep at it (to a point). My efforts for the most part will be restricted to enhancing things here and there. And I can at least assure you that we won't be doing anymore high payout contests anytime soon

BTW, I've just sharpened the FB slider tab graphic. Its cache likely won't refresh though until multiple page reloads have occurred. All of a sudden you'll happen to glance up and think to yourself, "hey, that looks much clearer!"

[94lt1]

I didn't know we did a 500$ giveaway.. Wow..

[spiritbird]

I remember all those.

[PlaxMacaws]

I didn't know we did a 500$ giveaway.. Wow..

Yep. In fact, here's a whole subforum dedicated to it: http://www.preciselyparrots.com/foru...-Posts-Contest

And Maddy won the $500 prize, btw.