I created the forum using PHPbb, unfortunately I am not really a website guru. One thing I liked about PHPbb was that people know how to navigate it because it is common in many other forums. The downside was that we constantly had a problem with spam machines trying to sign in to infiltrate the posts and I spent many hours sifting through the sign in data to try to separate real people signing in from machines doing the same. for every one sign in there were about 10 from machines.
It took an immense amount of work to try to get the frequency of posts up and I can only thank the users for making the website and forum active and valid. Without active members the forum is just empty software. The demise of many forums is that things fall flat and the more people post and the more activity there is, the more attractive the forum is to all users. If you are lurking and not posting , try to make a few posts and see how it goes and ask questions here if you have difficulty.
Now that I have been distanced from the technical process and we have some more web-savy people involved, the website looks much better. The forum’s functionality is improving and I know that switching back to PHPbb or something similar like vBulletin would be time consuming and we don’t want too many big changes ,we loose members with the switch-over and to keep the post count up can be difficult for the webmaster as that person has little control of it.
I think we could perhaps look at how many places we have to post, and take into consideration the frequency of use for particular sections of the forum. We may find that people might have an easier time with less places to post as they could then perhaps feel that they are getting all the posts in one or two places. This forum has subforums and it also has features to help see things like the most recent posts so perhaps that is a moot point?
How can we increase the post count? What can the web developers do to help?