Really though, what'll get this place the most users is of course advertising. Problem with that is twofold; one, it's not free, so it better be good; and if done badly, could offend the people we want to bring in... The copy-paste tagging code was a good example of advertising gone wrong.
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We have now implemented Anonymous posting in the "What's on Your Mind" forum, and I'm also considering to expand it to the entire forums.
That way, is someone has some question they want to ask, they can ask it anonymously. To help prevent abuse, forum admins and check a log and see who is posting. The biggest potential problem is spam, of course.
I respectively disagree. I participate in a number of other forums which are far larger than this forum and these forums do not and have never paid for advertising. Good well run forums where posters are treated as valued members of the forum beats paid advertising any day.
At the end of the day it is about good customer service and our customers are both those who post and those who read the posts. Paid advertising may bring a new customer to the forum but will not retain the customer if the customer is offended or disappointed by the service they receive.
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OBTW, just to keep the record straight, most large forums that are not part of a commercial software or hardware company, pay for advertising. I see their Adsense ads all over the net. LQ is one example. There are myriad others that do.
We have run Adsense ads in the past on other web sites. It can get pretty expensive and the results are mixed.
We had the largest number of actively monthly users when we were sending out automated reminder emails to inactive people, but we stopped it because of a few complaints about the emails.
I agree that being welcoming and accommodating to novices and new members (all members) is what keeps the community growing. But there is also a difference between keeping registered users who have posted to post; and getting visitors to register. We get huge amounts of visits each month, millions of unique visitors each month. Most find the answer to their problem and never register (that is a "good thing") and some register, post one question, and don't return (honestly, I have done that countless times as well with working a specific problem).
So how do we keep registered users participating? That is the question, I think.
Was looking at number of other forums recently. I noticed some forums are larger than this one, but the site was not "as clean" as this site. In addition, many of them also serve a page full of ads to registered users.
It might help increase our visitor numbers if we expanded into other related topic areas. For example the following potential top level forums come to mind as areas where I frequently answer questions for people here and elsewhere:
- Bootloaders - GRUB Legacy, GRUB2, BURG, Openboot, LILO, EFI, UEFI, GPT, etc.
- XML technologies - XML, XSLT, XPath, Xquery, etc.
- Mobile Linux - MeeGo, etc.
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OK, I'll add these forums. Already added a boot loader forum. Could you please write forum descriptions for each?
This may be fine actually.
But what can really improve the number of posts is, not just posting anonymously after logging in. Real anonymous post without logging in. This is what exactly perlmonks.org is following.
You dont have to login, you can directly post. There are a lot of ways by which spams can be avoided... May be by captcha, or moderation or something else.
Now the posts count is 53000, which is 300 posts between my previous posts and this post. And really it is not simple N number of posts, most of them are very useful.... Have a look at their mechanisms ( hope most of you already know ), many interesting things are there to attract people.. ( like Levels ).
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Reasons are:
- A new user dont have to spend time in registering in the forum.
- Already registered user can avoid even moderators or admins from knowing that he has only posted the question.
- And most of the times, anonymous user is used for answering.
But all these has to be done with care, so am putting into the discussion here..
( but am able to understand that while writing down this now, it may not work out for unix.com, where we always speak about more strictness here.... )
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I noticed exactly same thing. It is very nice, that this forum doesn't present so many ads and no pop-ups (which I truly hate). As for increasing number of posters... I guess people that are interested in developing their skills regarding subjects around Unix, scripting, programming etc.. will see that solving other people's problems helps them too. It helps to stay sharp in technology, which you might not use in everyday work, but can save you a lot of time someday. This is why I post here 
So in my opinion the ones that really want to develop their skills, have great oportunity and environment to do so here. IMO nothing needs to be changed 
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Yes, it is our policy to not show ads to registered users in the forums. Many forums now charge a yearly fee for registered users not to see ads.
I think there's a gap between newbies and old UNIX users.
I mean, the breach is cultural, it's about the Unix Folklore, I think newbies are missing that.
----------
- What is the command that will tell me the revision code of a program?
- Yes, that's correct.
- No, what is it ?
- Yes.
- So, which is the one ?
- No. which is used to find the program.
- Stop this. Who are you ?
- who am i
There is also the possibility that we have answered all the questions. Maybe what we need is a way for a guest to indicate that they have found the answer they were looking for by using the search function.
Knowing what people are looking for and not finding could help too. So, search statistics in general sound interesting.
There is a lot of wisdom in this suggestion.
I need to think about how to implement this idea.
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We once had a plugin feature that created a tag of all the Google search terms. Because we get so many (millions) of search engine referrals a month, our database grew too large (and too slow), for this feature. We could rewrite that plugin to prune the database, for starters. But, it seems we need more features that just a list of search terms to satisfy this idea.
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These are good ideas; but it is hard to get these new forums "up and running". It take a lot of work to bootstrap a new forum or subforum.
Then, again, we could search for old threads and mass move them into the new forums, if that helps.
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I think if someone were to create a nice, newbie friendly tutorial and course on unix/linux that it could bring more people into the world of unix itself...and if the tutorial is put together by members of this forum than those new people to linux will most likely head to this forum for their questions.
I am pretty much brand new to unix, and am pretty much having to self-learn it for an internship I am currently in and it is incredibly hard to find tutorials and how to's that are easy to understand. Almost everything I find uses terms and ideas that sound like gibberish to a new persons ears. If I didn't have to learn unix for my job than I probably would've given up on learning it by now.
@ huntreilly25, I agree. I think some well explained tutorials that explain concepts along with some hands on exercises could be very helpful to new users.
I think this forum lacks fun. If people can come here and enjoy themselves while still keeping the purpose of a technical forum it would bring more regular users. I think some contests and challenges (such as the first person to come up with a script or program to do x) targeted at different skill levels that reward bits could make the community more fun.
I think the bits are a great idea. I think the concept should be expanded by creating more places to spend bits.
Thats my 2 cents.
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I just thought of something else. I think we could create an employment section for employers to post UNIX related openings and registered users to post their resumes and send them to posted opening.
I'm not sure how technically feasible this is because I have never worked with vB but if it is, its something to consider.
Ugh.
Not fun? What do you call the Shell Programming and Scripting forum? People who are attracted to this site probably either want answers, not fun, or they derive more pleasure from technical quests than from spinning the prize wheel.
Also, I've had some unrelated experiences that make me wary of concern over fun.
I wasn't referring to a prize wheel. I was referring to technical challenges such as write a program in C to do this. Or something along the lines of: without using any modules write perl code to do xyz.
I agree. I find these forums very fun and so do many others because we minimize gossip, chit-chat, and focus on the technology in the absence of bullying found in so many other forums and email list.
For many of us, facts and low chit-chat are much more fun!
This is not "The Gossip Channel" or "The Entertainment Network"
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That goes to show you that "fun" is relative!
I think writing code without modules is a waste of time and not fun at all!
Another person might just love it!
Just an idea, maybe not increasing, but potentially strengthening the community: an IRC chat. I'd say 2 channels, one for quick technical questions (eg. "How can I filter on the second column using awk"), one for "chitter-chatter".
Hosted either on a private server (pros: more control, less chance of a channel-takeover; cons: no real redundancy) or on one of the established networks (freenode/IRCnet/...) (pros: established infrastructure, nick registration; cons: less control).