Why Do Users Sign up?
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Why do users sign up?
I could preamble and preface this with something but I won't, the simpler the better.
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O omega referenced this topic on
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@omega said in Why Do Users Sign up?:
Why do users sign up?
I could preamble and preface this with something but I won't, the simpler the better.
I want to support your efforts
I have been running a sports site since 2007. It went from vBulletin to XenForo during that time. The migration process was not painless- it took me a week of practice and hours for each export/import run…
I have one highly successful and popular forum (category) that gets about 500,000 views per month. The analytics shows that at peak times (big news days), probably 1/3 of the visitors are signed in. I have posters with 50,000 posts, so I don’t think it’s hard to do.
I think it’s just people like to read but participate no further.
XenForo does a better job at nagging people to sign up than NodeBB - I had to add custom HTML widget to do the nagging, where it is built into XenForo.
As a base platform, I like NodeBB much better.
But as a sports site, one of the popular activities is a “game thread” where we have hundreds of users posting to the one topic in real time as they are watching the game. Constant reloads and hundreds of posts and many potential posts at the same time. I don’t know how well NodeBB would handle it…
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@mschwartz NodeBB can handle scale... we've had some large instances throwing maybe 1000+ concurrent users at NodeBB and we've been able to handle it all.
Now, of course, a lot of it is contingent on preparing... static serving of assets, as well as vertical and horizontal scaling are the main two things we recommend, and that'll handle probably 99% of cases.
Game threads are fun, and there's a place for them... NodeBB has real-time integration in the topic, so new replies are automatically appended. It could be improved from a UX point-of-view... to have something akin to a "livestream" mode.
The demand isn't there, so we haven't built it
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throwing maybe 1000+ concurrent users at NodeBB
Also want to clarify this... when I say 1000+, I mean literally 1000+ connected clients. Older boards running php don't have a real-time connection and the server quite literally does not know how many people are online at any given time. They can usually only see the number of users online in the last 15 mins, etc... based on saved activity.
So a forum that says there were 10k users online might actually only see on average 100 active connections* spread out over an hour.
* pulling numbers out of thin air
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@omega said in Why Do Users Sign up?:
Why do users sign up?
Why do users sign up?
In my view, and certainly in my case with my forum, users sign up because of the unique content you have on offer. If that is available elsewhere via a simpler mechanism, then they will likely go for that route rather than your site. In the case of my forum, it is offering something unique in the sense that it has facilities such as mentoring, infrastructure help, guidance, etc - admittedly, all of this is available via Stack Overflow, but without the sarcasm, god complexes, and the like.
Here's an example of that in process
https://sudonix.org/topic/570/issues-with-routing
This specific user tried Stack Overflow, and because of the reasons he highlighted above, came to my site and got the assistance he needed.
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