How to stop flyers reading forum as a newspaper

"Lurkers", "readers"or "flyers" as you refer to them is part of the game.  

It is the job of the admins and mods to continue churning out topics that will be interesting enough for them to engage in or at least interesting enough for them to visit your site again, at least for a forum just starting out. 

Your first goal as an admin is to make sure that anyone visiting your site for the first time will think of visiting your site again and each time they visit, you should give them more reasons to visit again.

From my experience, majority of would-be members will only consider registering as a member if they become regular returnees to your site and if they find topics interesting enough for them to make a comment on.

They should also feel welcomed and feel that your site is a good environment to give their opinions or post comments.

Also, I think the right attitude for an admin of a new site wanting to get active members is to think that you need them more than they need you and hope that you, the admin, is able to give them a "service" or a "product" that they will soon recognize as valuable and soon think that they need you as much as you need them.

Excellent comments t-cell! Having followed Forums for quite a few years I have noticed that those successful will have a core group that do 95% of the back and forth. The rub is to get enough of these folks to make your Forum self sustaining. Activity begets more activity. Some controversy, if it does not get out of hand, can help as well.

It is not easy to form and keep a community going. You are competing with all the other Forums that monopolize people's attention. If you hide the posts from lurkers or require membership to see them you lose the ability to attract new activity. I have known some Forums that do this because they do not need this method of gaining new members. Usually they have the core group already established and can grow more through invites.

Yep, T-cell and Matt B have totally nailed it, imho... It's all about asking the right question, that is to say "how can I/we get them to get involved?" rather than "How can I/we keep them out?"

and t-cell contributed a fantastic How-To article on turning lurkers into active members: 

http://howto.lefora.com/howto-lurkers-to-active-members

Nice one T-cell!! And thanks for re-posting Chief. Am a bit tired now but will have a proper read tomorrow. Looks very interesting so far though...

Nice How-to T-cell! Activity, like you mention, is everything. What beyond that to get contributing members is probably into the Black Arts. Which is difficult for us more technically inclined folks to do. Although I have burnt the chicken feathers according to the spell, and chanted the Gettysburg Address sideways while spinning on the top of my head, I still struggle with getting folks to be active members on my Forum.

Maybe more eye of newt?

Thanks guys.  I kind of catered it more to lefora admins who just created their first very own forum or are less experienced but I hope the experienced admins can still find value in it and maybe remind them to go back to the fundamentals.

Turning lurkers into registering to become active members is one thing but it doesn't mean they will be active all the time.  I would love to read an article on how to make one's forum self-sustaining.  I hope someone writes an article about that.