What is on Your Mind?

Can we have some background as to why increase of the community is necessary? Are you specifically referring to users as opposed to visitors?

The "community" are people who post, not just visitors. That is why many people have made excellent suggestions like a mechanism for anonymous posters, etc.

Ok, so the background is generating more content, in particular from prospective posters that see registration as an obstacle to communicating their ideas.

Disabled because vB does not natively support an editor toolbar for unregistered users.

If we want to increase the number of people who actually post, we need to be sensitive to the fact that not all posters are technically competent. They may only be in the very early learning stage of a programming language or operating system.

We also need to be sensitive to cultural differences in the way questions are posed by posters. Anybody who has traveled extensively or lived in different parts of the world will understand what I mean. Those that have not will not fully grasp this cultural difference.

In particular we need to think carefully before closing a thread on a poster without a really good reason. Potential posters are not stupid and dumb; they see this behavior by moderators and simply migrate to using other forums where they are made to feel more welcome.

That's a good point fpmurphy. Thanks for reminding everyone!

Really though, what'll get this place the most users is of course advertising. Problem with that is twofold; one, it's not free, so it better be good; and if done badly, could offend the people we want to bring in... The copy-paste tagging code was a good example of advertising gone wrong.