Why are Forum & Blog Members Not More Active?

At a domain-name forum it was asked why so many members lurk on the sidelines and are not actively posting. I believe there are several reasons for blog and forum lurkers not posting more…

It goes with the territory even in a good market but a bad market (like we are obviously in today) makes it worse. Most folks simply do not like posting for whatever reason. There is an old adage 90% of the activity is from 10% of the members and that’s true in any business.

The lack of posts at blogs is also poor, i.e. this blog gets 100-200 visitors a day on average but comments and posts by others are not too common, as is also the situation at many other blogs too.

Some website and domain-name forum members may lurk because they feel like they are relatively minor players vs the heavy hitters so why bother to post? They may also think what they have to say is already well known so would not be welcome. 

I have seen that happen personally at a forum board when I asked a question about a subject only to have an Admin chime-in by saying that has already been much discussed here (often via my other posts) so no need to discuss the subject again. What made that incident so ironic is one of the reasons I posted about the issue was to help the forum and bring some activity to it, which forum was very slow and boring at the time. As an interesting side-note I can say that board appears to be even less active with lower public participation today.

Something similar recently happened personally to me at one of the popular forum boards where I was flamed a bit because a veteran member said instead of posting a question about an issue there I should Google for the information instead.

What is so interesting about him saying that is if we all followed his (unwelcome and ridiculous) advice far less issues would be posted and discussed at the forums and blogs (resulting in less blog and forum activity) since the information would have already been researched via a search engine.  How ironic is that anyway.

There is also a less obvious (but nevertheless real issue) of some members being somewhat depressed by reading about all the big sales (some for millions of $) taking place (mostly involving dictionary one-worders the average member do not have the luxury of owning) but they can’t get sales themselves and are also negative due to the ongoing declines in revenue, resulting in portfolios being trimmed a lot, often the result of high carrying costs vs lower income.

Proposed real-time domain forums daily list

It would be great to have a live real time updating daily list of all domains listed for sale posted by the popular domain name forum boards. This proposal is especially relevant to the more popular and fast-paced forums such as dnforum.com and namepros.com where it can be challenging to locate the somewhat rare good quality but reasonably priced domains of interest to the buyer.

A good approach would be for each forum to run a script which at midnight deletes the previous days for-sale list and replaces it with a new real time list. As threads are started with new domains for sale the domain(s) and link to the thread are automatically added to the days list which is refreshed many times over the course of 24-hours. The price bracket or type of sale would not matter in this proposal as all domains listed for sale would be shown and only listed alphabetically.

Other benefits (in addition to its main benefit of fast access to the domains listed for sale) are avoiding misc clutter, bypassing other posts in the same thread, less background noise (and seller embelishment and marketing copy) with a simple listing of domain-names listed for sale during each 24-hour time frame. Thus, a name of interest could quickly ‘catch your eye’ so to speak by scanning thru the domain list.

By clicking on the provided link to the sales thread you can get more details on the sale. You can then make a fast offer or buy at a ‘buy it now’ price (which is always what I personally prefer doing because I rarely if ever will make blind offers). To avoid search engine indexing of the list (which some domainers feel uncomfortable with) the proposed domain for sale list could use the format example-dot-com

Why am I posting about this? Because it’s so difficult to stumble on the relatively few good names listed for sale compared to all the others. For example, there have been a couple good names I would have loved to buy recently but what with all the ‘background noise’ when I first bring up a forum in the morning it takes a long time to locate those “good” name (especially when using Today’s Posts as I usually do). By the time I see a ‘good’ name which I like it’s often already been sold.

Just one actual example from this week is a name which sold for low-xxx but I would have paid mid-xxx for it if only I had seen the sales thread quicker. If this proposed real-time domain for-sale list was operational I could acquire a domain which I like and is in a category in my business plan, and the domain seller would have received more money for the domain, in this week’s example roughly $200 more in the sellers pocket. That scenario has happened many times over the years at the domain forums.