Hiding your board stats does influences first time users to navigate deeper.

Hiding posts, topic and member count does influences first time visitors to actually navigate. For one it takes their eyes off the number and to the actual content which is nice.

For example like alltopix they hid their post and topics stats. But limited the user activity. Which is quite an effective way of telling users limited detail but still influencing them.

When you do visit that site it just makes you feel to go view it and actually read something. This feeling of exploration should be on every website that want to succeed.
how to do it?

Well depending which software you have you would need to locate the template section holding the html for each forum row and edit out the statistical information. If they are <td.. tags we might need to add colspan into the td tags so that it doesn’t break, it all depends on the design though…

vbulletin edit to hide forum topic and reply count

Go to admincp > Styles & templates > Style manager >

Now find & remove in :FORUMHOME

<td class=”thead”>$vbphrase[threads]</td>
<td class=”thead”>$vbphrase[posts]</td>

save it

Now find & remove in : forumhome_forumbit_level1_post

<td class=”alt1″>$forum[threadcount]</td>
<td class=”alt2″>$forum[replycount]</td>

save it

Now find & remove in: forumhome_forumbit_level2_post

<td class=”alt1″>$forum[threadcount]</td>
<td class=”alt2″>$forum[replycount]</td>

save it

ipb edit to hide forum topic and reply count
Go to admincp > Looks & feel > %skin% > Edit template html

Now find & remove in: Board index > CatHeader_Expanded

<th style=’text-align:center’ width=”7%”>{$this->ipsclass->lang['topics']}</th>
<th style=’text-align:center’ width=”7%”>{$this->ipsclass->lang['replies']}</th>

Now find & remove in: Board index > ForumRow

<td align=”center” class=”row1″>{$data['topics']}</td>
<td align=”center” class=”row1″>{$data['posts']}</td>

Now find & remove in: Board index > forum_row_redirect

<td align=”center” class=”row1″>–</td>
<td align=”center” class=”row1″>–</td>

Now find & remove in: Board index > subheader

<th align=”center” width=”7%”>{$this->ipsclass->lang['topics']}</th>
<th align=”center” width=”7%”>{$this->ipsclass->lang['replies']}</th>

This technique will not only rely on this small hidding of data, you have to customise your forum in other ways, such as skin design, and images, etc…..

It’s just that you have to play around with small tricks to make users aware of your content.