Getting people to join

[DanielLC]

Does anybody have any ideas on how to convert people? I'm considering making a signature that links here, though I recently found out I wasn't the first with that idea. Any thoughts as to what I should make my signature say?

[RyanCarey]

Hey DanielC. I did create a signature of my own. I think it turned out cheeky at best, and confrontational at worst.

My signatures says:Do you know that the word ‘felicity’ comes from Latin ‘felicitas’ and means great happiness? If not, you might not yet have learned that utilitarianism is the best ethical system in the world. And that the intertubes have just found their greatest and only utilitarianism forum. I dare you to visit it at http://www.felicifia.org

Before writing your own, you might want to wait for Jinksy's signature. If he is at his best, it should be one to watch (no pressure, Jinksy )

You're right that it's about ideas. Signatures should be only the start of a multi-pronged effort to draw members to Felicifia.org.
We have to get the basics right: Making interesting posts. Settling on a style. Finding a logo
Then we have to mention felicifia.org on other forums (ideally with permission). Hopefully we can add felicifia.org to some other sites' links pages.
But ultimately, numbers will depend on our inventiveness and our imagination. I've set up a 'sitemeter' which basically puts our finger on the pulse.
If you come up with some ideas, please let us know. I'll make sure I do the same to you guys.

[Arepo]

Before writing your own, you might want to wait for Jinksy's signature. If he is at his best, it should be one to watch (no pressure, Jinksy )

Gee, ta

[Arepo]

Re the original post, we've been deliberately avoiding pushing the site too much while we get used to the system, pick skins and so on - meanwhile we're looking for people and places who'll be willing to help us once we do. Once we feel like we've got a reasonably permanent look we'll start linking to the site elsewhere - getting in a bunch of people at the same time seems like a better way to kickstart the site than half-heartedly promoting it now.

If you want to help out, there are a few things that would be useful:

1) have a look at the potential skins we've been contemplating, and let us know what you think, especially your immediate reaction. If you think none of them are better than the current proSilver style, have a look on 'Google' for something like 'phpbb skins' or 'phpbb templates' (we've already scoured phpBB's own list and the ones at http://www.phpbbhacks.com/stylesdemo/ so don't worry about looking there). The sooner we know which skin we'll be using as a default, the sooner we can design a proper logo and start trying to make this place look more professional.*

2) start asking the admins of any other forums you're a member of if they'd be willing to link to us or at least for you to link to us there. I'd rather avoid have permission on every site we link here from, unless it's patently obvious that the admins don't care about such things. Having given it a bit of thought, I also want to avoid signing up for any sites just to

3) look for bloggers who might be sympathetic to util, to ask if they'll link here and if they'll cross-post some of their writings here. The nice thing about bloggers is they're - almost by definition - keen writers of in-depth original posts, and from their perspective they're likely to get several more responses if they post on a sympathetic forum. Naturally if they want to link back to their blog in their sig, we wouldn't have any problem with it (so long as they're not here purely to leech our member-base!).

4) look outside the normal philosophy crowd for people from non-philosophical disciplines who might be interested in a personal invitation to join. In my - very limited - experience, utilitarianism is one among a crowd in philosophy, virtually despised among other humanities, tolerated among social scientists (economists being more sympathetic than most), and quite popular, at least as a background assumption, among scientists and engineers. That last point is an important one, I think - the most appealing thing about many of the secular forums I've been on isn't the discussion of nontheism per se, merely the shared background assumptions that allow you to learn without a sense of disjunction from people with an interest in all sorts of bizarre topics.

5) all that said, we don't want an exclusively utilitarian membership. While it would be nice to keep a majority, simply for the sake of community, we don't want the philosophical forums to become one big back-patting exercise (and we won't persuade many people of utilitarian ideas if the only ones who come here already accept them). I think there's a tricky balance here - we want people to be able to post topics presuming utilitarianism without being automatically contradicted, but 'he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that' (Mill) and so on... so it would be nice to invite specific kinds of critics here - to whit, reasonably friendly ones whose arguments consist of something more than bald counter-assertion or word salad, and who don't think morality can only come from accepting Jesus, Derrida or Rothbard as your personal saviour.

* The reason we want to replace proSilver is simply that, while we think it's a really elegant style, it's just too commonly used. But we definitely want something quite light, not too garish - while I think dark styles work well for gaming forums, they're inimical to the kind of long posts that we'll hopefully get from the more prolific posters

[RyanCarey]

Today I recieved a reminder of felicifia.org's traffic in the email today. (It's all available if you click the little sitemeter icon at the bottom of the page)
In the 15 days so far this month, felicifia.org has achieved around 185 visits. This is a similar to the level of action that felicifia.com has seen this year (340 per month). Felicifia.com showed more action last year when its posts were flowing. Remarkably, though, Felicifia.org's page views are something like double what we're used to seeing at felicifia.org. Whether this has resulted from Jinksy and I bouncing about from page to page as we fiddle about with the forum's controls or from phpbb's addictiveness and ease of navigation is something that we'll find out over time.

We haven't really engaged in a great deal of promotion of felicifia.org so far. That should ramp up over the coming months, particularly as we develop the appearance of felicifia.org and as I enter my university holidays. I'll certainly keep you posted!

[TraderJoe]

My take would be that when the time has come to publicise, publicity is swift and immediate. The target should be to achieve critical mass ASAP - if people get replies to their posts within minutes or hours, they'll be much more inclined to keep posting, IMHO, than if it takes weeks for someone to bother to reply.

[Arepo]

Agreed, hence keeping it all aside for now.

[RyanCarey]

I agree. But we must start considering ideas for Felicifia's promotion.