Competition Ideas To Increase Activity

Whilst the competitions have proved popular so far, most of the people who have been taking part have not been active in the forum. I'm keen for future competitions to encourage activity in the forum in some way.

Obviously there are downsides to this. Competitions that reward the highest poster usually result in a group of people contributing dozens of poor quality posts and winning the competition ahead of people who contributed high quality posts.

I would prefer to give prizes out to those who contribute the 'best posts' i.e. posts that are detailed and encourage discussion. In the past I have seen this cause some problems too though, with some people who contributed good posts disappointed that their post wasn't chosen as the best.

In the end, I believe that any competition that tries to force members to participate in the forum for a prize is flawed due to these issues and chances are that those who do contribute during the competition will leave afterwards.

Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that the forums are the best place to host competitions on WP Mods (rather than the newsletter and Facebook etc) and are the best way to encourage activity in the forums until they reach a level where it is self-sustaining.

I want to continue to host great competitions here on a regular basis therefore I'd love to hear your suggestions on how we can host fun competitions that encourage people to sign up and encourage them to participate here.

Also, do you prefer prizes to be awarded individually or would you prefer less competitions with more prizes. For example, I have around 15+ domains to giveaway. Would you prefer 15 separate competitions for these domains or a large domain competition where the prizes are awarded to the top ten winners/participants.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this so please leave a reply if you have time

Thanks,
Kevin

Thanks for the feedback Shiva.

This forum software unfortunately doesn't have a referral system built in (yet). There's an add-on available that allows referrals but I believe it only lets you refer members by email. It doesn't give you a unique referral link so it couldn't be placed on your website, Twitter etc. A referral competition is a good idea though.

Unfortunately there's no way to do that. I wouldn't want to adjust the forum in any way so that people can only leave long replies because sometimes a short reply is all that is necessary.

Also, any competition that rewards the most posts is just going to encourage lots of poor posts. I don't want that. I'd rather encourage quality rather than quantity.

That would be very time consuming. I write articles every day for my own websites and others. I just can't justify spending this kind of time for a competition.

I don't mind some moderation however if over 100 people are taking part in a competition as it could mean I have to check thousands of posts. It's just not practical.

A referral contest would be good but there is no referral contest built in. If we are doing individual contests, perhaps I could simple create some good discussion topics. I'll try this tomorrow. I'm going to post a domain name competition. What I can do is pose a WordPress related question and the best answer/reply gets the prize

Yes I'll definitely add moderators in the future. There's no need for them at the moment as the forums are still quiet. Once activity reaches a level that I can't moderate competently myself, I will appoint some moderators to help out.

Yes we need to think of some good competition ideas to encourage people to post here regularly

Unfortunately, there is no in build stats program in the forum software as yet. They are adding a stats option in the next update though I don't know how in depth it will be.

I just don't have the time to track views, replies and likes manually. Nor would I want to if I did have the time

I think a minimum post level to enter a competition is a good idea. We can make some competitions open to everyone and restrict other competitions to members with a set number of posts. The number of posts can be increased as the forum grows - perhaps a minimum number of posts that week is better so that once members reach a certain post level they just stop contributing to the site.