# Publishing posts from fake users
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [July 2, 2024, 3:55am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547 "2024-07-02T03:55:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 18
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Andry\_Osminin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andry_Osminin)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 3:55am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/1 "2024-07-02T03:55:35Z")
Hello everyone, please tell me. After creating forums, as a rule, at first there are no users, so the creators often resort to writing posts and replies to them themselves. Is there a plugin that helps organize this? For example, publish posts from different users and so on. I hope you brought up what I mean.
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### Author:  [@HAWK](https://meta.discourse.org/u/HAWK)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 4:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/2 "2024-07-02T04:01:28Z")
Hi Andry – no, there is no plugin that does this because it is a terrible idea. If you decide you want to, you can create multiple accounts but I cannot urge you strongly enough not to take this approach.
Ideally when you start your community you should already have a group of beta users or founding members who can create initial content while the community builds up momentum. Communities are about trust – if you are creating fake accounts to write content you are undermining the trust of your members and it will come back to bite you.
I’d recommend reading this resource (and the many other great ones on the same site).
> **[Six Community Launch Strategies And When To Use Them](https://www.feverbee.com/communitylaunchstrategies/)**
>
> The approach you take to launch a community in the 2020s depends on two things; the size of the audience and the type of community you're trying to launch.
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### Author:  [@Andry\_Osminin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andry_Osminin)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 4:05am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/3 "2024-07-02T04:05:45Z")
You don’t understand, no one needs an empty forum. First you need to fill it with content and then people themselves start registering. This is exactly how reddit started, when the creators wrote the posts and replies themselves. I don’t have a user base, I plan to launch a community and attract people from search.
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### Author:  [@ondrej](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ondrej)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 4:11am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/4 "2024-07-02T04:11:11Z")
> [@Andry\_Osminin](#):
>
> First you need to fill it with content
>
> > [@HAWK](#):
> >
> > you should already have a group of beta users or founding members who can create initial content
☝
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### Author:  [@HAWK](https://meta.discourse.org/u/HAWK)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 4:13am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/5 "2024-07-02T04:13:26Z")
> [@Andry\_Osminin](#):
>
> You don’t understand, no one needs an empty forum.
I do understand. I have been a community management consultant/professional for almost 20 years. 🙂 If you don’t already have a user base (even a very small one) then you shouldn’t yet be creating the community. I have seen your approach fail more times than I can count.
That said, you are free to do as you like, but there isn’t a plugin that enables this behaviour.
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### Author:  [@Andry\_Osminin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andry_Osminin)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 4:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/6 "2024-07-02T04:23:05Z")
I agree, but many forums exist independently. They didn’t have an initial user base. There are several plugins for XenForo that implement this approach. I think that there are successful cases of starting communities this way.
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### Author:  [@Architect](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Architect)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 4:52am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/7 "2024-07-02T04:52:45Z")
It is important to have content to attract an audience + community members, what kind of content do you want to generate with additional accounts?
Hypothetically if you are writing a script for a movie or a book with multiple characters that could help to use different accounts for different fictional people, but would be important to not pretend those are real people if you want to establish trust with actual people.
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### Author:  [@Andry\_Osminin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andry_Osminin)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 5:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/8 "2024-07-02T05:01:02Z")
I already have a forum on XenForo where I did the same thing. I wrote a lot of useful messages from different accounts, responded and created topics. Forum on the topic of computer games. People began to come from search and some registered and wrote messages and created topics. In my country, there are topics that are discussed only in the Telegram messenger. Many people try to find something on the Internet about these topics, but there is no community.
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### Author:  [@HAWK](https://meta.discourse.org/u/HAWK)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 5:37am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/9 "2024-07-02T05:37:37Z")
If that’s the case I would just post the valuable content from one account – that makes sense. It’s the pretending to be other people that is the issue.
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 6:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/10 "2024-07-02T06:20:21Z")
> [@Andry\_Osminin](#):
>
> They didn’t have an initial user base
That doesn’t matter. I had three users plus me. And those three were/are pseudo users for WordPresses and named by sites. And I created new content, as I still do.
That wasn’t an issue as it wasn’t on WordPress world. There is two things people just don’t see neither care: urls and writer’s name. But they see really fast two other things: if a content is created for ads, and if a writing user is fake.
But that is academic for you. There isn’t such plugin/component. So if you choose that road you have to code by yourself of act manually.
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### Author:  [@Andry\_Osminin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andry_Osminin)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 6:50am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/11 "2024-07-02T06:50:44Z")
Did not quite understand. Have you created organizational accounts and written on their behalf?
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### Author:  [@Isambard](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Isambard)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 7:13pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/12 "2024-07-02T19:13:26Z")
This is the bootstrapping question and I’ve seen people successfully bootstrap a forum this way. Discourse allows you to do it via impersonate, though you might want to use the API and write your own tools to do it more efficiently.
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### Author:  [@Heliosurge](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Heliosurge)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 7:19pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/13 "2024-07-02T19:19:29Z")
> [@Andry\_Osminin](#):
>
> You don’t understand, no one needs an empty forum. First you need to fill it with content and then people themselves start registering
Actually he does. @HAWK is saying you should have a group of ppl that share your vision and will work on creating content.
Your focus group can also help promote the new platform on other platforms.
That being said. The RSS polling plugin can help seed content either by configuring to post under your user account, one of your team or can create a null user. Be sure though if using a “null user” it is identifiable as say a bot ie feedbot.
I have been working a bit over a year. However the folks I drafted unfortunately do not seem invested in helping. So I am pretty much the sole content creator. Along with my newsbot. But not a lot of replies
So I need to work on attracting new members who are engaged to help.
Another thing that can be done is start a blog of your thoughts on a topic linking sources
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### Author:  [@Andry\_Osminin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andry_Osminin)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 8:08pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/14 "2024-07-02T20:08:32Z")
Impersonate looks like a solution to the issue. However, I wonder if it is possible to create topics and write posts from other users in this way. I want to create 10-20 forum participants, with whom I will try to create 100-1000 questions and answers to them with keywords.
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 8:15pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/15 "2024-07-02T20:15:19Z")
All the stuff about posting from bogus users seems like really good advice to me.
I client was interested in doing what you describe, so I started working on an import script that would read users, categories, and topics/posts from a spreadsheet. If you have a budget, you can contact me and I’ll see if I can make it work.
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### Author:  [@Andry\_Osminin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andry_Osminin)
#### Post date: [July 2, 2024, 8:35pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/16 "2024-07-02T20:35:57Z")
It’s a good idea, I’ll try to publish it myself first. If this is not enough, I will contact you.
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### Author:  [@Architect](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Architect)
#### Post date: [July 12, 2024, 6:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/17 "2024-07-12T18:40:26Z")
> [@Andry\_Osminin](#):
>
> Impersonate looks like a solution to the issue.
The impersonation feature is something that seems important to be very careful with, especially if you are wanting to create a community of people with trust. You could very quickly loose all trust from everyone if you attempt to impersonate someone else.
With discourse there is a staged user feature that works for if e-mails are sent in from an address not registered to an account, that will convert the e-mail into a new topic, which could work great for sending in questions that you could then write answers for.
It would be fairly obvious that you are talking to yourself if you try to have a whole conversation, but starting with writing up answers to generic questions that anyone might ask could work as a way to start.
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### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2024, 6:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/publishing-posts-from-fake-users/314547/18 "2024-08-11T18:40:52Z")
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