Just a simpe question. What would you say is a fair minimum limit a user should make per month in a forum for them to be classed as "active"?

With the forum im working on, I dont want 100 users with only 1 posts like some other forums I know *ahem*.

Look closer to a post per day for a decently active person.

Now, for a more sinister query. Would you complain, if a forum had 2 adds (one standard banner, one little square) on a page? If the website + forum was a content bonanza

I would avoid post-count requirements like the plague. The biggest problem is that requiring some level of posting activity will encourage or force people to overpost. If I know that I have not made my 10-posts-per-month quota, I will post a bunch of inane crap. The quality of your content will plummet if people feel pressure to post.

I also suspect that post-count requirement rules will simply drive people away. If I went on vacation, came back a month later and a forum was all pissy because I hadn't posted for a month, I would leave permanently.

If you are looking for real solutions I can think of two ideas. The first is to have a "display only active members" checkbox on the member listing screen. Visual space on the member lists is not wasted and more casual members aren't kicked off. If someone wants to see all the members, including those that have not posted since 2001, they can. If you want to get fancy, use a popdown menu of choices, e.g., show members active in the last 1 day, last 2 days, last week, last month, last year, etc.

Second, and more ambitious, is to create a scoring system similar to that used by slashdot. People who submit useful posts get scored as "funny," "insightful," "interesting," etc. People who post crap get scored as "offtopic," "flamebait," etc. Submit good posts, and your overall Karma score is high. Submit bad posts, your Karma goes negative, and you get kicked off. If you wanted, you could also have the system give low karma for low posting activity. And the way that slashdot moderates means the admins don't have to do anything. Users with good karma get moderation points that they can use to affect the scores of the posts -- the membership moderates the posts. By doling out only a limited number of moderation points to only the best members, the entire system is self-moderating. Another good example of a high-content self-moderating site is www.experts-exchange.com.

My 20 milli$ is to avoid rules that encourage overposting or discourage participation.

G4From128k

There are various sites around that have info on how to do this but it's not going to be something easy if you're not into html/cgi/php.

The way Im looking, it will be paid hosting, so I want to have once nice simple banner to try and minimise my expenence, along with some other stuff (Tshirts anyone ?). Ill like for some php code to do it.

All that really remains to be done is to "grease the rails" with the whole PAF issue.

I'm looking for ways to get my PAF up higher, so's I can get panther and an LCD projector panel

68k Macintosh Liberation Army Forums

© 2001-2003 68kMLA