I’m new to Discourse and I apologise if this question is inappropriate or in the wrong section.
My forum is up and running and our engagement is slowly increasing. However, we only get a new post once a day or so.
I feel like a lot of users may be deterred as the post views are in single digits for a considerable period of time. I was wondering if there’s any admin function to artificially increase the number of thread views to give the impression that more users are reading posts even if they arent posting.
Obviously this would be a temporary measure to encourage engagement, but I believe it might give some credibility and boost user engagement on my forums.
I don’t think inflating the post views is such a good idea. Why not comment on what is posted, maybe replying directly to a poster about what he/she has said. That would be a better way to get people involved in commenting as well as reading posts/replies. It’s better to start a conversation for real than to put up fake numbers.
AFAIK there is no way to inflate the post views as that may/would interfere with the different count routines that run in the background. My forum has been up just shy of 2 years. We have a very active group, but we do have several topics that have views, but no replies. Other topics have to be closed on a monthly or bi-monthly basis because of the number of replies. If your users see some back-and-forth discussions going on, they’ll be more apt to read them and possibly get into the discussion as well. That’s what you really are aiming for in the end… participation.
Your assumption is not wrong. It’s very natural for a good site admin - a good host of sorts - to be very aware of things like that.
The question is… is that really what your current users feel?
The simple truth is, users appreciate honesty more than anything.
You can hide the views column with a few lines of CSS like Richard mentioned above. Discourse makes it easy for admins to make such changes if they wish via themes.
That said, you’re trying to build a community, yes?
So, why not embrace the low view/reply count as an indication that something might need to change?
I don’t know anything about your community, but I do know this… the only type of sustainable growth is organic growth. Arbitrary inflated numbers don’t mean much in the long term. There’s only one thing that attracts new users and keeps current users engaged - Good content.
Focus on good content, and the views and replies will increase on their own. It might be a bit slow at the beginning, but this is excellent advice.
I run a disco-based website for the local city (a potential readership of computer-literate adults may be under 100k) for the past around 4 years.
Daily page views are just below 1k.
Without going too deep, I can assure that if my site had shown inflated/artificial views, my returning readers from the local city would be approximately 10 times more.
The main reason is that my readers go more for what shows than what is reality. If FB shows that a video has been viewed 1 lakh times and my site article has been viewed 100 times, they think FB has far more reach. They discount the fact that even a 3-second view of a video is counted by FB as ‘One/Single View’.
Maybe I’m not clear enough in what I wanted to say here, but the gist is that ‘what glitters is what sells!’, even if that glitter is not entirely true.
If the Discourse team would allow its users to apply that ‘false’ glitter, then Discourse sites will become much more sellable. As for credibility, let it be decided by the owner of that particular website/community how credible they wish to be viz-a-viz how sellable. Let them choose between long term credibility vs short time survivability.
