Comments on: Forum competitions are a bad idea

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:53:07 +0000

competitions may entice people to enter posts, but how do you ensure quality posts?

Maybe by having the competitions rules state that the posts must be relevant else all entries are disqualified?

By: Online community competitions attract mercenaries | Online Communities | Build an Online Community

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:09:16 +0000

[...] count or post count and almost all of them are inherently flawed. I am not a strong advocate of forum competitions, although I feel they can be successful if done [...]

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:22:49 +0000

Robin – That does sound like an interesting competition. Not only is it related to the subject of the community, but it also adds great content as people submit their entries.

Craig – Rewards for quality are always preferable to rewards for quantity. However, quality is far more subjective and hard to measure so you risk a backlash from those that disagree with your decision!

By: Craig

Craig — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 23:28:37 +0000

Agree with Robin. It would also be smart to award a prize for say, the most informative comment, the most humorous etc… thus encouraging the adding of quality as well as some quantity to the forum or blog. There would be no incentive to spam with “nice post” or if these were the terms of the competition.

By: Robin Chang

Robin Chang — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:34:26 +0000

Generally, it depends on what sort of competition. For instance, the BrickArms Forums hold competitions that involve building of actual LEGO creations based on a given theme. So a good competition is one where you have people actually DO something (write a story, build stuff and take photos, etc).

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:16:11 +0000

Sara – That sounds very encouraging! Make sure you keep the momentum going and don’t let any of your members forget about your community!

By: Sara

Sara — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:27:42 +0000

right now they are all still active which is great. They don’t start as many threads, but they do like to respond to them. The forum is still very new so I think there is a lot of excitement right now and people seem to feed off of that and want to stay very active. I just want to try to keep them excited!

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:14:41 +0000

Sara – It’s great to hear that you really thought through the aims and objectives of your forum contest. How many of the members that created new threads in order to compete in the contest are still members who post on a regular basis?

By: Sara

Sara — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:59:39 +0000

I started a forum a month ago today and about two weeks ago I did hold a contest. The premise of the contest was to give a prize to the person that started the most threads in a particular area of the forum (not the chat or introductions). I knew if I just gave a prize to the person with the most posts in a certain timeframe, I would get poor quality posts, but by limiting the forum and mandating that they start the thread, it would need to be a relevant post. It seemed to work well I think and it is something I will do again in the future.

By: Martin Reed

Martin Reed — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:48:53 +0000

Thanks for your comment. Wow, starting a competition then not awarding the actual prizes would be disastrous for a community.

It is essential that your members can trust you – cancelling a competition in order to avoid awarding the prizes will only alienate members and encourage them to leave.

Absolutely shocking.