What is on Your Mind?

We have now implemented Anonymous posting in the "What's on Your Mind" forum, and I'm also considering to expand it to the entire forums.

That way, is someone has some question they want to ask, they can ask it anonymously. To help prevent abuse, forum admins and check a log and see who is posting. The biggest potential problem is spam, of course.

I respectively disagree. I participate in a number of other forums which are far larger than this forum and these forums do not and have never paid for advertising. Good well run forums where posters are treated as valued members of the forum beats paid advertising any day.

At the end of the day it is about good customer service and our customers are both those who post and those who read the posts. Paid advertising may bring a new customer to the forum but will not retain the customer if the customer is offended or disappointed by the service they receive.

OBTW, just to keep the record straight, most large forums that are not part of a commercial software or hardware company, pay for advertising. I see their Adsense ads all over the net. LQ is one example. There are myriad others that do.

We have run Adsense ads in the past on other web sites. It can get pretty expensive and the results are mixed.

We had the largest number of actively monthly users when we were sending out automated reminder emails to inactive people, but we stopped it because of a few complaints about the emails.

I agree that being welcoming and accommodating to novices and new members (all members) is what keeps the community growing. But there is also a difference between keeping registered users who have posted to post; and getting visitors to register. We get huge amounts of visits each month, millions of unique visitors each month. Most find the answer to their problem and never register (that is a "good thing") and some register, post one question, and don't return (honestly, I have done that countless times as well with working a specific problem).

So how do we keep registered users participating? That is the question, I think.

Was looking at number of other forums recently. I noticed some forums are larger than this one, but the site was not "as clean" as this site. In addition, many of them also serve a page full of ads to registered users.

It might help increase our visitor numbers if we expanded into other related topic areas. For example the following potential top level forums come to mind as areas where I frequently answer questions for people here and elsewhere:

- Bootloaders - GRUB Legacy, GRUB2, BURG, Openboot, LILO, EFI, UEFI, GPT, etc.
- XML technologies - XML, XSLT, XPath, Xquery, etc.
- Mobile Linux - MeeGo, etc.

OK, I'll add these forums. Already added a boot loader forum. Could you please write forum descriptions for each?

This may be fine actually.

But what can really improve the number of posts is, not just posting anonymously after logging in. Real anonymous post without logging in. This is what exactly perlmonks.org is following.

You dont have to login, you can directly post. There are a lot of ways by which spams can be avoided... May be by captcha, or moderation or something else.

Now the posts count is 53000, which is 300 posts between my previous posts and this post. And really it is not simple N number of posts, most of them are very useful.... Have a look at their mechanisms ( hope most of you already know ), many interesting things are there to attract people.. ( like Levels ).

---------- Post updated at 21:27 ---------- Previous update was at 21:22 ----------

Reasons are:

1. A new user dont have to spend time in registering in the forum.
2. Already registered user can avoid even moderators or admins from knowing that he has only posted the question.
3. And most of the times, anonymous user is used for answering.

But all these has to be done with care, so am putting into the discussion here..
( but am able to understand that while writing down this now, it may not work out for unix.com, where we always speak about more strictness here.... )