One of the biggest things I strive for with my forums is quality posts, not necessarily a lot of posts, but just good posts. There's no use in having 10,000 posts if there isn't any true meat to them. I'm not sure that I've found any sure-fire methods of ensuring these quality posts, but there are a few things I've done to at least encourage them.

First and foremost, I think it's important to set a good example. If you and your staff are sure to post thought out and lengthy posts, your members are more likely to follow. Many spammers will feel intimidated inside of threads where there is a lot of good, meaty, long posts. If you have a lot of spam-filled threads, expect them to increase in size with more spam.

Second, you can always force people *not* to spam by implementing spam rules and enforcing them, but it's hard to do this. It is hard to define "spam" and you'll find that your members often dont even know what spam is. I attribute this largely to the fact that everybody has their own definition of spam. My definition of spam is different from yours.

Also, does it help or hurt to have an Off Topic section? On one hand I can see that it helps because it gives a place for people to get spam out of their system...on the other hand I can see how it hurts because it essentially encourages spam - not directly of course, but indirectly.

My general thought is to keep as much quality in my forums as I can...people will follow by example. If you have a lot of spam, you will receive a lot of spam. If you have a lot of quality posts, you will receive a lot of quality posts. There will always be exceptions of course, but generally, the dominant type will feed off of itself. Anything else you've found that will tend to spark quality posts?

Recently I have installed a spell checker [AJAX, it's quick and not fussy], to try and combat posts like "i thort tht it was da gr8tst thing", and non-English speakers posting funny abbreviations and also people who have problems with their space bar (like " hi im fr om <country> i like comp., gamez, and intrnt" Also I politley ask members who double post [particularly in the wrong forum, and within 5 minutes because they think it's an instant support chat], to refrain from doing so in the future.

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That reminds me, I meant to talk to the rest of the staff here about whether or not to add censors for common mispellings...such as a censor that changes "recieve" to "receive". A spell-checker is also a good idea, as I'm sure there are people out there who dont use proper spelling but would like to, and would if we made it easier for themt o do so.

Two good ideas, I'll have to look into implementing them here

Personally I would not censor regional variants of English - As I'm British I spell receive as receive and colour as colour... but it seems like an idea that would work if there was something on the site that told us about it so we don't think our spelling is on the blink.

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I wasn't talking about censoring variants of words...not to mention, isn't "receive" spelled the same everywhere? "Recieve" is not a word no matter where you live, it is "receive"...although I could be wrong.

I definitely wouldn't censor stuff like "color" and "colour"...I'm talking about actual typo's

asume > assume
teh > the

etc.

I think that receive is the same everywhere, because they have the rule, "I before E except after C, except when sounding like A as in Neighbor and Weigh". (English rules drive me nuts sometimes, but I guess it is ok if you can talk about them!)

I think the biggest thing you can do is post longer posts yourself, and hope that others will follow you with longer posts. People that post skimpy posts will feel like they don't type enough, and you can warn them if they continue with their one liners.

I think that Off-Topic sections should be on a forum, but they should not be the main focus of the forum. You should get more posts in the other areas every day than the off topic section. I go to a forum, and they have a conversation thread in the off topic area that doesn't add points to a users post count, and I can say that I hate it! People can post whatever they want, whenever they want. They post whatever comes to mind. It is just like a large instant messenger. It promotes spam all over the forum. They have what I would consider inappropriate conversations at times, and it just doesn't look good on the forum. Plus, by the end of the month, the thread for that month has about 8,000 posts on it, and I am sure that uses a ton of bandwidth!

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Regarding Off Topic sections and those "million posts" threads...I know what you're talking about, but, at the same time, I think it is good if the admins can consolidate all of the spam into one thread or a handful of threads. I would rather have people reply 10,000 times to one thread with spam than 10,000 times to threads all over the forums with spam. At least the first way you dont have to weed through all sorts of threads - you can just skip over that one.

Now, if the off topic section has a whole lot of these threads, that is definitely a different story. I wouldnt want to have to deal with 10 threads that are 100% spam every time I visit a forum. One or two is fine with me though. I just tell myself that it's better to have this one spam that is spamtastic than to have 100 threads that are slightly spamtastic.

The one off topic thread is a good idea, but that spam happens to be leaking out of that thread and people are posting off topic items in other threads and spamming other threads. They are also starting to say inappropriate things in other threads, and it is making the forum look like a bunch of 10 year old gangsters just posted.

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This is the reason I have a "Forum Games" section, as these usually have one or two word answers - so no post count increase there

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I couldn't agree with you more, Ryan. I would much prefer to see a member write out a lengthy post of several paragraphs rather then ten one-liners. It really does not take too long to write out a decent post, yet a lot of people are either too lazy or just want to post for the sake of posting; which I view as a foolish thing that individuals with no life would do. Some people may argue long posts are boring to read, and that something 'short and sweet' is more preferable, I still think of these people as lazy. Having the prolific writing skill is nothing to be worried about for the sake of people who do not know how to read a lengthy post.

Quality over quantity? Indeed. This works for me where actual member-base is concerned as well.

Unfortunately, I often see admins and moderators set a bad example by posting spam-like posts on a regular basis. That is bad form in my opinion. You want to have an average of at least semi-lengthy posts all around your forum. Once new people start seeing one-liners at every turn, they adapt that style as their own whether they are good members or not.

I am usually against having an actual 'Spam Your Heart Out' type area for a forum. Perhaps offer a miscellaneous forum where 'text' games are kept and there are no post-count additions, then that is fine. There are some fun games out there, where you can joke around with (such as ^ < V) and as long as post-count increases are turned off I say go for it.

*Keep in mind I only read the first post of this topic*

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