20 reasons for members to start a new topic on your forum

[James---]

What are some reasons for members to start a new topic on your forum?
You can create a topic on your own forum with those reasons to encourage members
to start more new topics, so that the activity on your forum becomes higher,
because other members will often respond to that topic, and that's a good way to build content.

And of course, as a moderator or administrator/manager, you can open your own topics
to start new discussions.

20 reasons for members to start a new topic on your forum:

1. You want to share your knowledge with the community
2. You want to answer a question or frequently asked question(s)
3. You have a question and you're looking for answers
4. You just want to say something or want to talk about something
5. You disagree with something
6. You want to share a tip or good advice
7. You want to talk about the latest products/developments about your topic or niche
8. You want to share your favorite websites or blogs
9. You are curious about the opinion of others and ask for it
10. You have a goal in mind, but you don't know how to reach it
11. You have a problem and want to solve it
12. You want to get your frustration out
13. You want to talk and say something to all members or only a specific member on the forum
14. You saw and article, a good resource, a blog, a video, a website, or something else and want to share it + talk about it a little bit
15. You want to share your experience
16. You want to write an article or two
17. Something is not working for you (in your life) and you're stuck
18. You want to put your thoughts about something about [the subject of the forum] online
19. You want to hear success stories of others
20. [...please enter yours here...]

The list is not complete yet. You can add the last one. Number 20!
And of course, feel free to add more reasons for members to start a new topic in the replies below.

We run our own forum at http://www.geldverdienenopinternetforum.nl and we are going to place those tips in the "new members" section directly. This is just an idea of us and from now on, we hope that members are going to open a lot more new topics on the forum. We think these reasons are useful for you community members, so we decided to share this. Why not.

[Kindred]

of, course, in reality... those 20 reasons are really only just two...

1- you want to share something (experience, knowledge, opinion, advice, frustration, etc)
2- you have a question...

[kat]

20 - Spam.

[James---]

of, course, in reality... those 20 reasons are really only just two...

1- you want to share something (experience, knowledge, opinion, advice, frustration, etc)
2- you have a question...

But - you do want to give members as many reasons as possible, because this is a broader and more interesting perspective, then when you give them only two. The goal is to get people to open more topics on our forum and it helps to give them a whole list of ideas, because hopefully it's pretty inspirational.

20 - Spam.

Ha ha. Yes. That could be another reason for members to open a topic but you don't want that one in this list
to kinda say "you know what ... you can place some spam on the forum because that is a good reason to start a new topic".
(unless you have a spam forum, that it is a good reason to open a new topic).

[Kindred]

I don't know about that... personally, your post seems kinda pointless...   anyone who makes their way to my forum alreayd knows WHY they want to post....

[Irisado]

I don't know about that... personally, your post seems kinda pointless...   anyone who makes their way to my forum alreayd knows WHY they want to post....

They ought to anyway  .

It must be said, I've never seen any post on any forum I've been a member of which has stated something along the lines of 'help, what should I post?'.

It seems to me that having such a great long list of reasons for posting might be a bit off putting to new members, and would probably not be read by many in any case.  Members who post usually post because they have some kind of interest in the forum, so advising them what to post seems to be a bit unnecessary, and could possibly come over as being rather patronising.

[James---]

Don't you think that you can help members by giving them some ideas?
Some members don't have a question and post nothing. But often they have some knowledge
or good idea where the whole group can benefit from. This post is meant information purposes,
just to give members some inspiration.

[Irisado]

It depends on the type of forum you have, but in general, you're likely to have those who are inexperienced, or new to the subject(s) discussed on the forum, and they will naturally ask questions, which more experienced members will then respond to (in all probability), even if they don't start threads themselves.

I just don't see any reason to force the issue.  Members will post without needing guidelines about what to actually post.  If you want to have guidelines about how best to format a post, or structure arguments, and so on, then that's okay, but that's as far as you need to go in my opinion.

[Chalky]

I think that list looks a bit patronising.  Surely those who are interested in posting will already know what they want to post, otherwise they'll just read and not even give a thought to posting, if they bother with the forum at all.

In my experience, the only members who look for inspiration for what to post are the admins

[kat]

I forgot...

21 - Pr0n.