The art of making people answer to your posts?

[Marsmallos]

Sometimes i wonder why it can be so difficult getting answers to your topics (not in this forum by the way but in so many others) ...
Is there some kind of secret model you must follow to get people interested? I dont know if anyone else has experienced this but sometimes it can be so amazingly slow that two a months after I got my only reply the replies start streaming in....
I think this is really strange

[Thorolf]

The answer is easy: Post at the right boards…

The community feel is very different from board to board. In busy places, people tend to crowd around popularity, so if one has answered to a post, 10 times as many will bother to even read it in the first place. And overall topic quality is often lower, so this serves as some kind of “quality” control. In other, more quite places, people tend to read a higher precentage of the posts, and contribute wherever they feel they really have something to say.

Also, it’s important to find out what people on a board is interrested in. My topic Top Scientists talk about Science and Society hasn’t received a single answer here, so people seem to be just not interrested in these kind of things. Rather random entries, like this one, are bascally irrelevant to virtually everyone, and would be better off on ruuz’ personal blog…

Regards

[reith]

I'm not sure about this. I agree some sites build a community that eventually popularises one or more people who will always hog attention. There are music sites better described as chat sites with music as a loose common denominator. Then there are specialist sites (I tend to regard this as one) where almost every original post gets answered. Possibly the media (or the first lines of many novels) have the idea - raise a question so that the reader has to read more to find out the answer. Although I'm sometimes irritated by original posts with titles like "What do you think of.....?" so you have to open the message to find out. Sorry to say, I avoid the temptation to read them most times.

Some posts express a rhetorical opinion to which there may be no constructive answer.

We've all had unaswered posts. Sometimes the subject is obscure, sometimes a post is buried in a swift moving thread and readers don't read all messages, or just that the thread runs out of steam.

[Whataguy!]

One thing I like about this site (and this has been said before by others) is that mostly everyone is friendly and tactful about comments and criticisms. This makes it easy to post stuff here, and it's a great place to learn. I've heard that in other forums, you have to have the skin of an armadillo because people in the disguise of "honestly" are just downright mean.

I agree with all that has been said, but would like to add that in order to get replies we have to want one. In other words write as if we expect replies. For example, a lot of times I have been guilty of posting works and basically saying: "This is what I've done. Revel in it." How does anyone reply constructively to that? Whereas, if I had said: "This is what I've written. Any comments or criticisms would be appreciated," I'm sure I would have received more replies.

[Boneman]

Originally Posted by Whataguy!

One thing I like about this site (and this has been said before by others) is that mostly everyone is friendly and tactful about comments and criticisms. This makes it easy to post stuff here, and it's a great place to learn. I've heard that in other forums, you have to have the skin of an armadillo because people in the disguise of "honestly" are just downright mean.

I agree with all that has been said, but would like to add that in order to get replies we have to want one. In other words write as if we expect replies. For example, a lot of times I have been guilty of posting works and basically saying: "This is what I've done. Revel in it." How does anyone reply constructively to that? Whereas, if I had said: "This is what I've written. Any comments or criticisms would be appreciated," I'm sure I would have received more replies.

In a word "Absolutely!"