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Post Before Register = Double User Contributions

There are thousands of successful forums (and other sites that accept user reviews and other contributions) out there, and every one of them requires you to register before you can post. How annoying is it when you run across a thread on a forum where you aren’t a member, and you want to add a post, but registration is required. Sure, it’s only a few steps, but it can easily take 3-5 minutes to complete when you include the fact that nearly all forums send out an email verification (containing a link that you have to click on) before you can post.

When new users come to your site, you should throw out a red carpet, not throw up a blockade. Registration before posting turns countless users away; these are users that would contribute at least one post or thread and possibly become a long-time user of your site.

There are a couple solutions to this problem:

1) Let users begin to write their new thread or new post without registering, then after they submit it, ask them to create a username/password and enter an email address. They will already have invested time and energy into writing their post, and will be more likely to take the extra minute or two to register. Top sites like TripAdvisor are already doing this.

2) Don’t require email verification. Most forums offer captcha verification (to block spammers), which is enough anti-abuse protection for most sites, especially those sites with active moderators. Email verification just further reduces the odds that your users will complete registration and begin contributing to your site.

Testing the Theory

To test the theory that implementing #1 and #2 above will increase new post and new thread activity, I put both into place in our TechIMO.com tech support community site with 550,000 monthly unique users. After putting both changes into place, new daily thread submissions have increased 78%, and posts have increased 72%.

Putting it Into Action

Implementing #2, disabling email verification, is easy, and most forums support this as an option (where you can enable captcha verification in place of email verification). Implementing this step alone will have a positive impact on your site.

But implementing #1, allowing posts before registering, is tricky because no forum software offers this option. For TechIMO.com, we wrote our own vBulletin modification to make it work. If you are a developer or have access to one, it’s not difficult to do. If we receive enough interest, we might release the changes (for vBulletin forums), as a mod.

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Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.