infamous tips for increasing traffic

[heretic]

A lot of people ask how to increase traffic, and we always say the same nice things. Now it's time for something different. Name all the not-so-honorable things you have done to promote your board, or things others can do.

Note: This should not involve anything malicious against a competing board. This includes spam flooding and cracking the competing forum.

- spam. go to competing boards and squeeze your url in any way you can. You'll probably be banned after some time, but you shouldn't even be going there in the first place

- create 15-20 clone accounts. I'm too lazy, but you might not be. Have discussions with yourself. This gives the illusion that you are busier than you really are, making new members more inclined to register

- hack the "who's online" to again make your forum look larger. extend the cookie timeout to last all day if you need to

- start an exodus. I haven't done this one, but I've seen it done before. A lot of large forums go through a phase every once and a while that tend to upset a good number of people. capitalize on it. viva la resistance so to speak. offer a place as a heaven for them to go to. Make sure if the competing site goes down, yours is up and running.

- offer giveaways for high post counts. Can be anything cheap.

- bug larger sites to mention you. I've seen a couple forums explode from 100 or so members to 10,000 just because a magazine has mentioned them

[ffaBen]

A lot of people ask how to increase traffic, and we always say the same nice things. Now it's time for something different. Name all the not-so-honorable things you have done to promote your board, or things others can do.

Note: This should not involve anything malicious against a competing board. This includes spam flooding and cracking the competing forum.

- spam. go to competing boards and squeeze your url in any way you can. You'll probably be banned after some time, but you shouldn't even be going there in the first place

I've done that before, sorta Went to tell another site about some hotlinker they had, basically got a small bit of advertising in there.

- create 15-20 clone accounts. I'm too lazy, but you might not be. Have discussions with yourself. This gives the illusion that you are busier than you really are, making new members more inclined to register

Not that desperate.

- hack the "who's online" to again make your forum look larger. extend the cookie timeout to last all day if you need to

lol

- start an exodus. I haven't done this one, but I've seen it done before. A lot of large forums go through a phase every once and a while that tend to upset a good number of people. capitalize on it. viva la resistance so to speak. offer a place as a heaven for them to go to. Make sure if the competing site goes down, yours is up and running.

We always try that last point Usually we are.

- offer giveaways for high post counts. Can be anything cheap.

Yup we do that Custom Avatars and Ranks.

- bug larger sites to mention you. I've seen a couple forums explode from 100 or so members to 10,000 just because a magazine has mentioned them

We've done this on a smaller scale.

[Mijae]

Anyone want to use my forums as oficial for their magazine?

[nemesis01]

We just have a network of about 8 cheats site that all use the same database and all use our forum as theirs, works quite well.

[HexOnxOnx]

LOL This is all too funny. I did the cookie timeout to 2 hours before while I was once running a forum that had a huge competitor. The competitor later caught on and changed their cookie timeout.

I also tried the creating "new members" but it gets old talking to myselves

Back when I tried out a teen advice forum, I went to another teen advice forum and advertised the board in my sig. Got a few members that way but when they didn't see the traffic that the other board had they didn't come back oh well....

I did have great success in the Exodus thing but after a year we had very few posts and I gave that board up.