Post by snap2000 on May 5, 2012 15:26:05 GMT -8
Is there a substantial reason to know referral information, though? That stuff usually degenerates into faux-pyramid-scheme type deals, I think.
A referral field tells you who got you the member, not where that member came from. Maybe he wants to know what websites they are coming from, so as to know where to target advertising in the future.
Oh, I interpreted it as being a personal referral in the context of invitations. Perhaps something like Google Analytics could be useful to track information like that, then? I do realize it still wouldn't be able to tell you specific information about people who do end up registering, though.
Is there a substantial reason to know referral information, though? That stuff usually degenerates into faux-pyramid-scheme type deals, I think.
I don't understand how that stuff would degenerate such a scheme? I've seen other popular forum hosts use this feature and that never degenerated...what you said. As for your question, I tried to answer that already in my post above and I don't know what else to add other than I think it'd be nice to know where our members are coming from.
Whenever I've seen referrals (as in, "Patrick Clinger told me about ProBoards Support and I joined") it has been reward-based. It's good to know that this isn't always the case—my personal experiences have clearly made me quite biased. I feel like such a referral system would put focus on getting people to advertise for personal gain or recognition rather than building the community first and letting word-of-mouth advertising follow naturally.
Referral statistics as in seeing if people registered after visiting from another forum or a google search for certain keywords strikes me quite differently (particularly the latter). That kind of stuff can provide useful insight into fields of interest related to a forum that had not been considered and can be a guide for growth and development of the forum.
