Would you rather have a dozen members who are pretty active, or loads of members who do not post that much, but are active regardless of their daily post count?
I would personally love plenty of members who would post on my forum, without care of making a ton of posts a day per member, than a few members who carries the forum by their post count.
I would rather have a small handful of members making a few good quality posts per day rather than a bunch of members making 0-1 posts per day. I like forums and online sites because you can get to know other people in the online community, so I think having a few dedicated members definitely promotes the idea of an online "family" more than a lot of users posting very little.
I do think there should be a healthy mix though. It's one thing to have a small, but thriving community, and another to have a small community that makes no effort to bring in new members. People will leave, whether it's in groups or one-by-one over time, so I think it's important to always aim to bring in new members throughout time even if that core group of members changes slightly.
I actually prefer smaller forums with a nice group of people who actually interact with each other. 🙂 I guess, a mix of both. Those few members who post a lot are needed to keep the activity going. The rest come by and post every so often on the topics those other guys have created.
I would rather have a small group of people who post often so I can get to know them and then find their Facebook and stalk them. 😛
But I rather have an active forum than try to explain why there's such small post stats yet a large member count.
When Christianity Haven first started I wanted as many different members as I could get to post on the site. I wanted it to look constantly busy. I still prefer to have the site have posts each time I log in but now I think I'm more inclined to say I like having people who consistenly log in and post good, quality content on the site. When there is a topic on the site that I want to look up to find out more about on Google, there are times when CH has come up on the first page for results so that's nice!
I prefer active discussions over games and battles to be honest. Reasonable topics or something to learn from is lot better than activity for the sake of it from something like X vs Y, last one to post, hello/goodbye discussions.
Active is not easy to get or come by on forums. Tend to see more older forums to have it going more then small. You can get good content going but it's just you have to make them to keep on going otherwise if you stop they stop and don't return. Then again it's not always about forum content as members or yourself have to offer things,
