Building An Online Community Are membership incentives good?

[hashbang 0]

A pondering and question ...Governments through immigration incentives have increased community capacity, in the form of increased social and economic outputs, since the formation of organised states. Under these schemes new migrants are obliged to pay taxes, in some countries, vote and abide by relevant laws. Thus an increase in population results in the overall increase in the states economic and social capacity – it becomes more powerful.Many believe that real world theoretical cultural/economic/social constructs do not apply to cyberspace. Applying bricks and mortar community building and community capacity to online forums continues to be debated (which I’d be happy to discuss and elaborate on further if any wish to do so).I have participated in a number of online communities where membership was encouraged through various incentive offers – more privileges, increased rank or raw membership prestige to name a few. I am not convinced this has increased the community capacity of these communities. Such incentives tends to attract short term members who wish to quickly elevate their status or privileges and in the process, their actual contribution to the sum total output of the community is minimal at best. This results in a community where membership turnover is high and the community is in a perpetual ‘formation’ stage (my assumptions here).As to why I am here … the free web space of course! Hehehe, but equally important to me, … it is witnessing the birth of an online community from a cyberanthropological perspective.What do you think about the posting incentive of Xisto? Does it promote a positive community? Happy PostingDr. hashbang

[shaldengeki1405241473 0]

I'm not sure it necessarily promotes a positive environment. I mean, it's not really hard to get to ten decent posts and all, but as you said, it does promote many more "freeloaders" who post ten times decently, get an account, and leave the boards permanently. Hopefully many of these people are caught and kicked from the system, but I'm sure at least a few of them slip by unnoticed.In addition, the posting incentive induces a sense of obligation. After awhile, people may start posting simply to maintain their account. A lower limit to posting should never be declared, since that would only allow them to post the absolute minimum and hang on by a thread to their accounts. Instead, the administrators and moderators should look at each poster's recent posting history in detail, and judge whether or not they deserve to keep their account. Everyone deserves a chance to defend themselves, as well, so they should contact the user and request that they post more often personally. If they do not present a decent argument as to why they should not be kicked from the system, then they deserve to be kicked.Besides, if colleges posted an absolute minimum requirement level to get in and accepted everyone who applied with those minimums, pretty soon you'd have Ivy-League colleges overflowing with people who are willing to do only the absolute minimum to be guaranteed success- not the people who are actually willing to work as hard as they can in order to achieve the highest level of success possible.I'm sure this has already been considered and put into place somewhat... but yeah, something doesn't sit well with me and the posting incentive. At least remove the minimum posting rule so that people are left guessing as to how often and how good their posts should be. Only then will you have people actually contributing valuable opinions.

[Soleq 0]

I doubt that it promotes a "postive" environment. Perhaps you should define "positive."As for the rest of your post, I believe the high turnover rate is due to the typical ease of joining, lack of online-communitavism (self-described spinoff of nationalism), and general loss of initial interest. I guess if there were actually phsyical borders or natural barriers surrounding said community, then the turnover rate would be drastically lower. However, since leaving an online community is as simple as closing a window, there's not much you can do.

[rmdort 0]

only we members can make this a great community to hangout for discussion and views. Mutual trust is very important here. Removing the post count wouldnt increase contribution coz who will care to post if he gets hosting for free. I think the post count for hosting in Xisto is decent.

[OpaQue 15]

We have our Partner site ( http://forums.xisto.com/ ) where we have a lot of spam problems and stuff. Most of the members post for hosting and there is no specific restriction regarding topics and stuff.Astahost was specifically developed for Quality posts. Since, we are expecting quality posts, it was obvious that we have to provide more here. For that, we provide our members with better stability, features, Dedicated BW etc. If we wanted traffic, we could have got a lot by Xisto alone and we could had spent more time on trap rather than building this another huge branch for Xisto Corporation ( Main site still under development ).We were not satisfied with Trap as a community. We are improving slowly. We are still a young company and learning by our mistakes. Xisto forums are targetted towards skilled talented people who have lots of information to share and contribute. Incentives like hosting does work well to quickly build up a community. However, We are really glad to welcome members who might already have hosting and would purely want to share their knowledge with us. As for the positive envoirnment, we have a lot of forums and categories. We have done this that members may not find difficult to post about the topic for which they are most interested. Even when a user posts for keeping his account active, We are sure he will find some intereesting topics owing to the increased no. of signups.. We usually look for quality rather than quantity. However, judging this might be difficult once we get huge number of members. The staying active rule is very generalised. We havent specified the limit. All we mean by saying it is that we expect members to contribute their knowledge whenever they can. We generally do not delete members accounts. but if our services are abused we might start deleting accounts of members who have records of high inactivity. We are also working upon an algorithm to detect inactive members.. Hope we finish it soon

[hashbang 0]

Thanks OpaQue, I appreciate the response.I'm not against the post requirement here, as a matter of fact, I think it's keeping things pretty level and not letting spammers rule the boards. I think this is a bigger issue/question for any online community to consider. Soleq said it wisely when he mentioned that to join and quit is really just a click of the mouse away.Perhaps we can plan ahead and ldo some future planning on the nature of our community? Best wishes to all,hashbang

[mhykhh 0]

Now this is what i call a quality thread... I agree with opaque, my main reason for joining this community is to get that free hosting package but when I looked around, there are lots and lots of interesting topics that made me come back and post. It's a great community so far, very very few spammers. Hope it stays that way. Hope you finish that algo your doing opaque. Cheers

[Brian1405241474 0]

It's hard to say. You can get more people if you offer incentives, but many will just be there for the prize and won't post good, but you will still get more people and some of those will be good, contributing members. It just depends on your approach to incentives. I have an forum and to get users to come I just try to keep the place nice and add little extras like new emoticons and more avatar galleries. No incentives for more posting.

[Ryan1405241476 0]

I just have contests and require you to be a member to enter, too early to tell if it's working though. I guess that would be concitered an incentive for people to join but I think advertising is good and just require them to register to post and if they llike thwe community and want to post they will join I would think.

[LoipsD 0]

I have been to and participated in many forums. Forums, which actually pay you to post, and others which couldn’t care less what goes on around their online community.It is a very hard job creating a only community which won’t die after a few days, I have experienced this many times. I tried and did everything I could to promote the forum and get it noticed around the Internet with no luck. The problem is that you have to have something new and creative that no one has though of. Thinking of something new is the hardest part of making your community.Think of it this way, suppose you create a computer help forum. Why should people come, register and post on yours when there are plenty more with thousands of members and way more active than yours. They can easily go there and register and get a response within minutes of creating their topic.There is another way many “forumers” try to get their forum active, by having all members register before being able to view any topics. This is the most stupid thing someone could ever do to an online community in my opinion. What good is that going to do? Ok so you got the user to register. S/he will now just register and view the topics and most likely never come back.Creating an online community takes a lot of work. You cannot just create a forum and hope that it will have thousands of members chatting away with no care in the world, this will never happen. You need some way of attracting users. Forums are one of the smartest things anyone has ever thought of. They keep ideas organized and have create friendships among members of an online-community.With my experience in creating forums, I have found that forums will not work if you give up. If you really thing you have something new and creative, stick to it. Once the first member joins, that’s when you will finally start to grow as a community.

[Jguy101 0]

If you just want people to join, it can be bad, because many people will just do whatever is required and leave.

 

However, for other things, such as those "Free iPods" sites (a link to a nicer one is in my sig; I say "nicer" because some of the offers, such as eBay and AOL, don't require you to give out a credit card number ), it can be good; for example, I'm giving people GMail accounts, but first they have to join, AND complete an offer, and it needs to show up on my "Refer Friends" page as completed.