Staffing Love our Lurkers: What can an admin do to make their site more enticing?

[Morrigan 1,826]

Lurkers are important, whether you be a temporary lurker who is sussing out the place, or a permanent lurker, who is enjoying what other people have written. With that in mind:

 

From a lurker perspective, what can admins do to make it easier for you. An example might be: ensuring that guests can easily view all threads that have received a post that day. Whether that be IPS's activity feed, or jcinks getactive link.

 

As an admin, what do you think you can do to help lurkers lurk? What have you done in the past?

[Garmr 106]

As a lurker having an easily navigable site where I can read rules, general overview about what the site is about (setting, overarching story, etc), and a quick who's who in the zoo is helpful. However, the clincher for me is if I get a good feel from the people in the site... if it feels to cliquish with people only interacting with their chosen set I immediately move on.

[Bro 89]

When lurking:

 

•  I generally look for a good-looking site skin
  • meaning not too cluttered, or dark, or full of complicated hover-over/ scroll boxes that are hiding all the good info. 
• I want to be able to see the applications of the characters on the board
  • I don't want to make the exact same character as someone else by accident. If there's already a rugged no-nonsense cop who has a tense but respectable relationship with a spunky young partner, I don't want to unknowingly make a gruff, straight-laced CIA agent destined to be stuck with the plucky intern, for example. 
• I want to see some out of character interaction as well, like a cbox or Titan embeded Discord server.
  • Community is everything to me.  If I don't see anyone communicating, even if just to complain about the weather or post gifs at each other, I either think the site isn't very active or the people aren't very nice.
  • Also, I'm not likely to join a site I'm lurking on's discord server if I have to go seek it out separately. I'd rather it be embedded. This may or may not be an unpopular opinion. I do a lot of my writing at work, and i'd rather not have to go to my phone just to feel like I'm part of the site (and I'm not going to open a window for discord on my work station).

[Stat 60]

I'm going to second the people above me and say that one of the most important things is that I can see OOC interactions so I can get a feel of the community before joining. I spend a lot of time lurking before joining sites, and I check what people are talking about, how they react to each other, if the community feels friendly, interesting, if we'd mesh well. So if I had to log in into one of those guest-friendly discord servers to get an idea of what's going on, I'm gonna feel pretty awkward doing it a couple of times a week, and probably won't join.

 

The other thing is, yes, recent activity! It makes my life so much easier to get an IC feel for the site if there's a convenient way to see what was posted that day! Don't hide your new posts button, folks!

[Jaxx 317]

• Having the entire site viewable to guests. Apps, threads, comms, lore, all of it. I'm not going to join if I can't tell what the average writing level is (word count, grammar and spelling accuracy, if posts are generally two massive paragraphs of twenty sentences each). For apps, the level of detail given, and accuracy in case of canon characters. For shippers/plotters, do people actually post enough that I can get a feel for their character and how mine might interact with them without having to read their app.
• Not having lore/OOC behind an 18+ or registration wall. What horrendous R rated things do you have in your plot and rules?
• Having important threads like rules or species information in simple templates that don't have a lot of moving parts or images. I don't browse on mobile but having things constantly moving can distract or overwhelm me on bad days.
• Having concise threads for background. If you have three or four rules threads I'm not going to bother because y'all are way too focused on rules for my taste.
• Having the Discord embedded, active, and guest friendly. Nine times out of ten, when I see a chatbox it says "hey come join us in the Discord, we're more active there" and I don't get why people have their cbox up in that case. If it's just a link, and the cbox is embedded instead, then I usually have no idea what level of OOC communication you have, and I feel hella awkward coming into a Discord only to leave a couple days later.
• Having a skin that's easy to read and navigate, and category/forum titles that are easy to identify.