Adding Fake members

[Page]

Did I achieve anything? only very little for a very short time and ended up paying a lot of money. It's better to hire people here to post for you and promote than to pull that stunt.

learn from your mistakes

 

[KnownSyntax]

I don't think that adding any fake members will help out at all. If anything it would just make the community look even worse than it does with having members appear to be real and not (sometimes it's easy to catch other times it can be very hard to notice it at all).

 

[Beverly]

Adding fake members into the online list will help?

What if there is an plugin that will add fake users in the online list to make the forum appear busy. Well! there is an plugin for that

You select the member that you want to add to the online list, from your members list. Once added, the fake user will appear to view the forum index or read random topics. Then have a choice to remove it

I say do whatever works for you. And, that goes for anything really not just forum management. After all, it's your own business. And, you would be surprised (or then again maybe not) what other forum owners are doing to make their forums look busy. A good friend of mine created an alternate account on her Doctor Who forum and engaged in some really amazing conversations with herself there :/

Sad thing, I didn't know the second person was her on the other account for at least awhile until she confessed it. Seriously she was that good at it.

I can kinda see the issue here, as to why someone might want to use (or think they want) this kind of script - if you have that "Who's Online Now" list and it shows literally no one. Then yeah, people are going to be thinking, oh this forum is dead.

But if you have no posts but a lot of lurkers (fake accounts etc as described before), then what is the use of that?

I think this is a challenge a lot of forum owners face. You want real forum members who are actively engaging. I had that challenge when I owned a general chat forum, seriously the hardest kind of forum to get members for :/

Maybe gaming is harder forum to build community for, probably as there are so many gamer forums online now.

Not that I would support the fake 200 people online (example above) but a few will not hurt if you have literally no one on during the day/night, whenever you want the forum active. I'm sure there are other solutions as people have already said in previous posts here, but to suggest this idea will absolutely damage your forum? That's a little far-fetched.

Sorry if I missed your point of your discussion, just being supportive of your ideas if it helps. You know what you're doing! Trust your own best judgement for your forum. 🙂

 

[Corzhens]

Pardon me for this comment but honesty is still the best policy. Adding fake members is just like fooling people and also yourself. There was a time that I had joined a campaign for a political candidate. The social media account of our candidate was needing followers to give an impression that our candidate is already winning in public opinion. There were these guys who came to our meeting (they were invited by one of the organizers). They were offering fake followers by the thousands. They were actually selling us that service. But wisdom prevailed, we declined the offer. My suggestion for the site in adding fake members is to launch a campaign to get real new members.

 

[Jason76]

Paying people to join might also be bad, cause they probably don't like your forum (like in paid-to-click sites PTC). Of course, I'm assuming you'd be paying them to join and nothing else.