Post exchanges to me are not fake because its a mutual collaboration between two forum owners trying to help one and another out.
But there are websites that offer members in bulk in you spend money. I think Fiver has a lot of these offers.
In reality, the users are fake and probably match the same IP address or they're registered by many people but abandoned right after.
The problems that can arise from this mainly is being cause being deceptive. If caught, it will make you look like you are lying.
I once bought a general forum for about $100 and basically paid for database of fake users and content that was then reattached to the person's new forum after he sold his to me. I didn't know until the deal with done. I definitely learned my lesson on that one.
How do you feel about fake members? Is this a strategy that you feel is worth the risk or are you against it?
In my opinion, unless you have members that do come back every once in a while, it doesn't matter if they're 'fake' or not. Activity, even if there's just 3 members is much better than a large board with no activity.
I think this is a bit of grey area and a little dependent on how you define 'fake members'.
A forum with no content is going nowhere, neither is a forum with just the owner's content unless it's incredibly meaningful or perhaps somewhat contentious. To encourage growth a forum needs content and interaction and that interaction needs to be meaningful.
Post exchanges can work if both parties really understand how to grow a forum. Sock puppets where the owner takes on the persona of an imaginary member can be even more fruitful but they do present a moral dilemma.
I've personally never seen a paid to post package produce content of any virtue and for me it equates with scraping the barrel, something to avoid.
When I built my forums I created 5 accounts. These 5 accounts interacted with each other and gave the impression that the forum has regular posters. However, the fake accounts were not created to impress advertisers or forum buyers. Just to make sure that the forum is not a ghost town.
I got to admit that I also made more than just one account, From making accounts for other people so that they can then reset passwords and emails. No idea why I do that as it's easy for them to do it 😛 and made an account for Announcements "welcome bot" that I do not use anymore and of course made a couple to keep the content going but after a while, if I'm too busy with things they get to be inactive. 😛
Fake members are just made by a single guy who still owns those accounts and is not really fake. But I had many Spam members account coming by the site that is just damn fake indeed, with IPB it gets banned before they have the chance to even get to change their profile image.
That being said..!
Making more accounts yourself for the sake of being new content or keeping the site alive can impact your forum also. Talking about the long runs. It's cool and whatnot but at times is not a good idea 🙁 same say do it YEAHHH, and others say, you can but in the long run you will regret it.
If you are looking to fake activity or online users, there are a bunch of paid plugins from a few authors (dependent on the forum software) that can do just this. They will make users who will browse your community every so often, but obviously not post or create threads (unless you do so on their behalf).
The core issue with creating a forum or keeping it "active" is just that, if you have no activity, then many new people will see and just leave. Likewise, if you have a bunch of posts with fake accounts, they can see that since the posts are from the same X users. It's kind of a lose-lose situation, where a new forum has to make some activity with some help otherwise it takes far too long to get actual members who are willing to spend time on a brand new forum with little activity besides their own.
I see new content and members just come and leave anyway. Well, traffic in that case. I see so much traffic trying to log into the site and yet why to log into the site if you have not even got an account
