Wi11 - 6:45 pm on May 18, 2004 (gmt 0)

Seems to me that this is a strategy for paying out for low-quality posts - and therefore a low-quality forum.

It depends what content the site is based around. If it is only forum posts then yes, quality could be a problem. However this is true of other sources of traffic such as search engine referrals.

It could be a gamble between bringing in a lot of people and pruning out the poor quality posts or having a small amount of people and waiting longer for people to come.

Surely the way to build a forum is to attract people who want to say something to the readers (including the lurkers) and, conversely, attract those who want to read what has already been posted. I wouldn't have thought you'd get these by a mass of posts that were made purely for financial rewards.

The rewards aren't financial, they are getting extra features on the site that make it more fun to use. Also no-one is rewarded for posting, only for referring a new user.

At the end of the day, if someone sent an affiliate link in this scheme to someone for say, WebmasterWorld, they are only going to register if they are interested in the subjects WebmasterWorld covers and it's quite likely that their posts will have some value.

Anyway, that's enough talking about the idea for me. I've convinced myself, even if I haven't convinced anyone else. ;) Time to try it out.