I did copy it, it just didnt stay copied... very wierd.
After migrating a large forum community, www.scubaboard.com (http://www.scubaboard.com/), to vbulletin 3.0 I began to closely analyze the site's traffic and posting rates. What I found shocked me; every day ScubaBoard generated over 5,000 unique user sessions yet our registered user activity was only around 1,000 distinct accounts per user. Equally alarming, I discovered that nearly 1,300 out of 20,000 users were unconfirmed accounts and many more users had never posted despite being active. To combat these problems I decided to take use of conditional templating to create a 3-phase plan.
Step One: Turning lurkers into members
Looking at my referral statistics it was evident that almost all of my traffic was coming in through subpages from google or other search engines. This raised an immediate concern as I realized that vbulletin 3 only contains a welcome message on the forum homepage. While it may be evident to any forum admin what a forum is about and why you should register I would imagine that a lot of users in a non-technical area might have no clue what my site was about or how they could join. Therefore I decided to move my welcome message directly into the header template. This means that instead of only a few users seeing the welcome message, every user who is new to my site or who isn't logged in sees a message on every page at the very top telling them to register. To even further increase the impact of this modification I rewrote my welcome header to better explain my forum, list some of the popular categories and link members directly to the registration page.
Step Two: Making users confirm
Just because a user isn't confirmed doesn't mean they don't want to use your site; often time a user signs up with the wrong email address or forgets to register or their spam filter blocks the welcome email. Whatever the reason I found that many registered users were coming back to my site, logging in but not doing anything because the unconfirmed group had even less permissions than a guest. Going off the header I had created for lurkers/ new users I added another snippet of code to inform unconfirmed users that they were indeed unconfirmed and to give them a link to get their confirmation codes and another link directly to support if they ran into problems.
Step Three: Get non-posting users to post
Another chronic problem faced by many forums including ScubaBoard is insuring users post after registering. Looking at other forums that I have personally registered for I began to realize that many new users, especially former lurkers would complete the registration process but not post because of the hurtles involved in getting into the board (registering, confirming). As a way to combat this part of the problem I added a third and final header for users with no posts. This header reminds the user about the forum and entices them to go to the intro & greets forum where they can post directly and get involved in the community.
Step Four: Welcome Messages
I know, the article title says three steps but after testing out the results on a real-life audience I discovered a fourth and relatively simple way to provide even more posting from new members. A hack posted at www.vbulletin.org (http://www.vbulletin.org/) allowed me to integrate PM's into the registration process so now when someone signs up they are sent a welcome PM automatically. The PM is rather basic and basic containing welcome text, a description of the forum and a link to our intro & greets forum. To add to the effect I also rewrote ScubaBoard's welcome email message to provide a little more enticement for new users to come back and post.
The results:
Since speculation is really nothing more than a guess the real value of welcome headers only became evident after I evaluated a complete month worth of statistics. What I found was almost as shocking as the problem I had discovered a month before. In just thirty days I was able to increase my posting rate by over 3,500 posts a month. New user registration went up by over 200 users which translated into nearly 10 new users a day. User activity is up 50% and my welcome/ intro & greets forum has exploded from 10 posts a day to pages of post every day. Even working from scratch this entire set of modifications took only 30 minutes to write and integrate but I've gone ahead and made it even easier for you by including my code in this article.
Modifications/ Code:
These instructions apply to vbulletin 3.0, other forum systems may have their own templating systems
Edit template FORUMHOME and remove the conditional for the guest welcome message.
Modify the first_visit_message phrase to be a bit more descriptive than the default vb3 welcome message (this is the message guests see).
Edit template header and add:
<if condition="is_member_of($bbuserinfo, 3)">
<br />
<!-- ############## UNCONFIRMED MESSAGE ############## -->
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<thead>
<tr>
<td class="tcat" style="color: white;">
Unconfirmed User Notification
</td>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="alt1" align="left"><p style="color: red;">Your account has been registered with $vboptions[title] but has not yet been confirmed.</p><p style="color: red;">You need to check your email and follow the link provided in an email we sent you when you registered. If you have lost this email, or it never arrived, please go <a href="$vboptions[bburl]/register.php?do=requestemail">here</a> to request a new email. If you suspect your email address is set wrong, go <a href="$vboptions[bburl]/sendmessage.php">here</a> and fill the form out so an administrator can fix your account.</p></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<!-- ############## END UNCONFIRMED MESSAGE ############## -->
</if>
<if condition="$show['guest']">
<!-- guest welcome message -->
<br />
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<thead>
<tr>
<td class="tcat" colspan="<if condition="$vboptions[showmoderatorcolumn]">6<else />5</if>">
<a style="float:$stylevar[right]" href="#top" onclick="return toggle_collapse('forumhome_welcome')"><img id="collapseimg_forumhome_welcome" src="$stylevar[imgdir_button]/collapse_tcat$vbcollapse[collapseimg_forumhome_welcome].gif" alt="" border="0" /></a>
<phrase 1="$vboptions[bbtitle]">$vbphrase[welcome_to_the_x]</phrase>
</td>
</tr>
<tbody id="collapseobj_forumhome_welcome" style="$vbcollapse[collapseobj_forumhome_welcome]">
<tr>
<td class="alt1" colspan="6">
<phrase 1="faq.php?$session[sessionurl]" 2="register.php?$session[sessionurl]">$vbphrase[first_visit_message]</phrase>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tr>
<td class="tcat" height="15" colspan="<if condition="$vboptions[showmoderatorcolumn]">6<else />5</if>"></td>
</tr>
</thead>
</table>
<!-- / guest welcome message -->
</if>
<if condition="$bbuserinfo[posts]<1 && !$show['guest'] && !is_member_of($bbuserinfo, 3)">
<br />
<!-- ############## NEVER POSTED MESSAGE ############## -->
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td class="alt1" align="left"><p style="color: red;">
Hello $bbuserinfo[username],<br>
Our records indicate that you have never posted to our site before! Why not make your first post today by saying hello to our community
in our <a href="/fxx.html">Introductions and Greets</a> forum. With over xxx users and more than a xxxx posts across dozens of categories
xxxx is a great place to find xxxx.
</p></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<!-- ############## END NEVER POSTED MESSAGE ############## -->
</if>
Credit & links: If you want to integrate a welcome PM hack you will need to register at www.vbulletin.org (http://www.vbulletin.org/) and find it there in the 3.0 hacks. I also would like to thank merk from http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=615280 (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showpost.php?p=615280) who enhanced the unconfirmed user message.
As for the intro forums, I don't think I've ever used one... i've lurked around here for a while but if people want to be that negative, no problem, I can say hello.