What's keeping you from becoming a member?

[BusaWhipped]

I was reviewing the site logs and once again asked myself, with all the people coming to the site why don't we have more people signing up?  There are about 250 unique visitors to the site every month not including robots and spiders.  Videos are being downloaded.  Ride maps and driving directions are being printed and emailed from the site.  Yet most visitors are choosing to stay anonymous and only a handful are actively contributing to the site.

This topic has been unlocked to that guests can post here.  We'd like to hear what's keeping you from becoming a member here.  Before posting, keep a few things in mind:

1) We expect you to abide by the ShowMe Riders Organization posting policy.  This is a family oriented site.  No profanity, abusive language, or harassment will be tolerated.

2) Any posts that we feel are not appropriate will be edited or deleted by us.  Our opinion on what is not appropriate is final.

3) If people can't behave themselves here, this topic will be removed and the board returned to member only posting.

[BusaWhipped]

OK.  I had to lock this down.  The only replies that were getting put here was SPAM, so no more guest posting.

[Mac]

People like lurking!  It's fun!

[Tom Owens]

My honest two cents:

Too many forums. It's a common problem across the web: Everyone makes 15 or 20 different forums trying to specialize in everything. If you've got a thousand members, you can do that. But until then, keep it more simple. 4 or 5 forums max. Reason being: On a new forum if someone shows up and sees a whole page length of forums and only half of them have more than a few post in them, they'll think the site is dead and not bother.

If they see 4 or 5 forums and constant activity, they'll jump in. Instead of 100 topics with 4 post in them, by having fewer forums, everyone has to post very close to each other. That breeds knowing each other, and that attracts members. As your membership fills up and post in, say, the general forum become so numerous on different topics that you can't keep up with it, THEN create a new forum for certain post made a lot in that general forum.

More post by more people in fewer forums will attrack a following more than very few post in 15 or 20 forums.

Again, just my two cents.
Tom