How do you get inactive members back on your forum? I use VB, and was wondering how to get my old members back. Forum has been up since 2001, and have about 1200 active member, but about 2500 that have posted at least 1 message, but none since...

Any suggestions? (any ideas specifically on how to use VB to create an auto email to welcome persons back...)

Any ideas... I have members, this should drive traffic back to my site...

Thanks...

Do you send out a newsletter? Many times members simply forget you exist. Send a newsletter to all your users and maybe some will see it and decide to come back.

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Another thing that I do, as newsletters tend to just get deleted is to send a mass PM to everyone. But I have removed the PM content from the notification email, so if they want to read their PM, they have to come to the site and login to their account.

I then put the newsletter content and usually some big news item regarding our software in the pm to make it worth the effort.

I have a huge problem with inactive users, and this allows me to do a couple of things - get the warm bodies back to the site, and weed out the truly dead users. If they don't come back for a PM, they are never coming back, and you should just remove their account.

It works great and on any given mass PM I send out, I can usually get 3k-5k of my previously inactive userbase to come back and read the message. Of that, a small percentage will hit the forums and post a few messages. I try to limit it to a monthly thing, and it seems to work nicely.

There is a mod called mass PM that I use. Beware though, if you don't stop the mass pm every 200 pms or so, it can cause your server to crash, as it is a very intensive process to pm and then email each user (and process bounces). Just something to look out for...

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Michael Sasek

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While I've never had a *major* problem with inactive members, I've found that sending out a newsletter is the most effective method of bringing them back. For example, a few months ago, I had about 30 inactive members. After the newsletter was sent out, 18 of those members came back. Sure, not all of them came back; but a good chunk of them did.

Chris

The biggest reason (or excuse) I've gotten for people disappearing is they've lost the url and didn't know where to find the boards. Agreeing with the above people, newsletter are great. Just make sure to put the board address on them

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Yes, you definitely don't want to forget to include the URL to the forum. I don't know how many times I've had members come back, and they've all said something along the lines of, "Well, we wanted to come back, but we forgot the damn URL!".

Chris

Sending out a PM rather than an e-mail is a brilliant idea.

People are generally nosey enough to log on to look what it says.

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Thanks to all... Ended up sending a mass PM to all users that have not been on the site in 12 months...

Wow, really surprised what happened... Had over 200+ members log back in, and started to post messages again... (and clicking ads)

Thanks for the advice...

So do you guys have your settings so that everyone gets an email notification message when a new PM arrives?

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I have my settings set so the members get an email when a PM arrives...