pros and cons of incentives

[disgust]

I recently made some changes on my forum that had a pretty drastic impact. before, I was getting about 30 members a day.

I changed it so you can't view links without signing up (and that's a fairly big part of the forum, as a lot of links lead to things people are there for, etc). I went from 30 registations a day to about 300. I was ecstatic. however, almost none of them are posting.

I could make it so there are incentives once they've actually POSTED and been there for a while, but my fear there is that it'd encourage low-quality posts just so they can get the allocated amount of posts.

anyone dealt with a similar dilema? how'd you decide to deal with it? how can you incentivize posts without encouraging low-quality posts?

[rogerd]

>>how can you incentivize posts without encouraging low-quality posts?

That's a tough question. In my experience, some people will put up a bunch of low quality posts for the most minimal of incentives - changing from "member" to "senior member", for example.

If the incentive is more substantial, like site privileges (or money), many more will post junk.

I don't think there IS a good solution to this dilemma - good moderation is probably the best available. Removing a batch of low quality posts from someone trying to pump up his count will get his attention.

[disgust]

the only thing I've thought of, really, is to give people "manual" rewards based on quality of posts, or "best new member of the month," "best thread of the month," etc. it is somewhat of a pain but at least it makes it obvious that you can't spam your way to the top

still curious if anyone else has any solutions