1 - Politely, ask someone to join in your fleet if this person don't have any fleet.

2 - Offer the invite *before* sending an invite...

3 - Is better to send an invite to a friend, always

4 - Offer a fleet invite to who talks the same language of your (in my case, portuguese).

5 - Offer an fleet invite, but before, show your fleet's website, spend some time talking about of your fleet and other things before sending an invite.

In my case, my fleet value the quality of the members. We spend a lot of time teaching, explaning, helping and chatting, making tutorials or guides to our members or people who wants to join with us. We don't send blind invites becuse we make friends of at least good relations with friendly people before sending fleet invites. Is a good thing to do, and works really well.

If you want only numbers, is easily to send any blind invite to anyone by random. But to have a good quality, you have to work carefully with a lot of attention to your veterans and newly members.

No problem to send fleet invites, but plis, spend some time chatting and making at least a relation with other people, a friendly relation to become a friend and member or at least, a friendly person if he or she turn down your invite. Members are temporaly, but friends no.

+1 to this. And you could have a little side mission to go visit it at a certain level so you know where it is and what it does. That would be nice.

This is driving me nuts. I get blind invites on my chars all the time and the way it's bugged I have to spam the decline button every time for the window to go away. Either give us a way to block invites or people need to quit the blind invites. To me this is the most annoying part of STO right now. The rest of the issues I can wait on and over all I love the game but that stupid window can really be a pain especially if you zone and the window wants to get buggy.

Also there are the various social events every couple of weeks, usually posted on this board. And there are the various group mission queues, look for people you enjoyed a run with and talk to them afterwards, particularly during time-gated stuff. But yeah I'm sure a lot of people turned off zone chat on day one, and local chat on day two, not gonna get many quality people there.

Also if you post in the forums too, give some details as well, beyond 'we're friendly and looking for people.' A number range (some people are looking for certain sizes), what kinds of activities you go for, what the group goals are, what sets you apart from the fleets with a thousand members across a dozen different MMOs, that sort of thing.

We've had this very thing sinse launch.

You can block invites, by the way. It's a hard setting to find, and it won't stop them from PM'ing you.

Click on the "Social" button, in the middle on the buttons to the right of the mini-map. Then click on "Privacy" in the bottom right of that window. The setting to block invites is in there.

We don't advertise, nor do we send invites at random. If someone asks for help we give it, if they then want to join our fleet they ask. If we fly with someone whom we think would be a good fit, we ask them if they want to join us. They say yes, and we send the invite.

We are a small fleet, but a good one.

Personally, I've never gotten called out on spam, and we use almost exclusively Zone Chat. Once about every five minutes seems appropriate (I post, wait about a minute, run an STF or fleet mission, then post when I return to set my pace).

NEVER blind-invite.

Always talk to the person before you send the invite. Ask if they have any questions. Answer honestly. Be friendly.

I would love to use the forum area, but that doesn't reach 90% of players, and even then the front page turns over every two hours.

Most people aren't aware you CAN search the fleets, and even then it doesn't really give enough space for the recruiting message, or the vital stats of the fleet itself (activity, member count, etc).

THANK YOU! I couldn't find that even doing a google search for it.

It doesn't show them all either. It's like it only shows fleets that have a member in an instance of your zone.

As for the advertising thing... I dislike zone advertising, and if I see your message more than once within a few minutes, I report it as spam (because that's what it is). Let the message go out of the buffer where it can't be seen when you scroll up... and if you're in a fast moving area, wait a few minutes past that. Otherwise you'll annoy people.