I know theres a way to act as a user and post but that takes a really longtime when your just trying to populate some content. On Xenforo theres a plugin which I think is a good idea but not sure if its possible for discourse? It allows the admin or mod with privileges to have a drop down of users and post as that user from their main account. This worked great and fast for building content. What would something like this cost if it is possible?
What I do is make use of the admin wrench to change the post author immediately after posting. It’s not perfect but it works. Definitely make the change within the 5 minute ninja edit window.
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Id have to do that when everyone is sleeping lol
You can see this thread for a discussion.
tl;dr
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I disagree with that and for my userbase I find Huffmans post was correct. Frankly no one wants to belong somewhere where they think they are the only member or only talking to 1 person. With my first vbulletin I populated it, threw some adds on out and on reddit and got it growing with a small community. I only kept those fake users around for about 2 weeks into the advertising and responding to others. Sold it off to someone from another forum shortly after.
For this forum I did the same but without populating it so much and only 5 active users with little content. Its been a waste of money for adds and isnt growing anywhere. In fact I lost users from my facebook and other social media sites I had. They went, maybe half signed up and never posted one single time.
So Im not about to waste any more time for my site before using ads or heavily promoting it until i can grow the content to what people want to see. Its not a helpdesk that people need to go to.
Another thing I found from one of my other mods is the click bait titles work. And work very well, attracting thousand times more hits then “normal” titles.
I know forum owners in my competing market and every single one used fake users in the begining.
Simply create multiple accounts using email addresses and plus addressing.
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Which was also in the thread I pointed to…
If you’ve got lots of posts, you might want to do it with API calls.
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