In my daily travels around the internet I will often go to some forums that have been around a bit longer than mine and I will see 400 or sometimes even 600+ guests online.

Usually these sites have like 3 members online and hundreds of guests.

My forum cant seem to get more than 50 guests online at a time. My forum is also bigger and more active than a lot of these but just doesn't get as much traffic.

What can I do to get my site to be one of those sites with hundreds of guests online at any given time? Is it just because these forums have been around for longer? Something isn't adding up here.

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Photoshop

Some webmaster will increase the timeout on the admincp from 900 to 9000 so it will make their forums look more active.

Other then that, I just say build back links and quality content

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Hmmmm...
Ya, that might explain some of it.

The rest I guess is just backlinks and content like you said.

I'm going to get to 400+ guests online without cheating and setting it to 9000.
Just takes time.

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Photoshop

Most of the guests online in forums are search engine spiders, so more frequently updated content and amount of content you have, more of these will be there at your forum.

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India Travel Forum | India Travel Directory | India Photo Gallery | Free Travel Directory

Where in the AdminCP do you go to change it from 900 to 9000?

options - cookies and http header options.

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Photoshop

That's just deceiving. Although, on some forums it's pretty obvious, i.e a forum with 500 posts having 500 guests online

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Bryce R [[ BLOG ]]
The Blogging Café - Blogging Forum
Do you run a forum? Check out my forum owners blog.

Just submit your site to several social bookmarks, it wouldn't be that hard to get 500 guest on your site in an afternoon of submitting.

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I did some adding last week, and the one directing most these days is stumbleupon, weird enough, got me each time a peak for several hours.

But as usual content is what will over time really attract. And make them come back

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Aeroclix -- DistantHost link directory
Domains hosting, server rent... -- Distant-Help link directory

Stumbleupon is a great way to get some visitors
How to use Social bookmarking to your advantage - vBulletin Setup

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