Contests

What would be a good contest to have on a forum?

I'm thinking of having a contest on my forum. I'm trying to make my forum look more active in an effort to attract more people to my forum.

Moved to more appropriate forum

Bazinga!, it depends on the topics of your forum.
What your forum is about?

My forum is based on a series of books called 'The Last Apprentice'. It's about a boy named Tom Ward who becomes an apprentice to the local spook and it's the spook's job to get rid of ghosts, witches, boggarts, and every manner of things that go bump in the night.

They can make an image with Tom Ward and generally with the book.
And this image will be displayed in the register.

Not a bad idea.....

What can I use as an award for winning the contest?
(other than their image being seen in the register)

A special rank or give them access to some forums that can only be viewed by some members ( If you have that forum ). I don't mean the staff forums.

Okay, thank you for the idea's. :D

If I think something else, I will post it here

Okay, thank you. I'll take any suggestions people offer.

You can try maybe like a hunt to solve a missing puzzle of The Last Apprentice?

Jaw wrote:You can try maybe like a hunt to solve a missing puzzle of The Last Apprentice?

Hey, I like that idea. Thanks!

I remember seeing a lot of forums doing a lottery contest.

As helpful as contests are on forums, I think they can hurt them as well.

For example, let's say that you're hosting a posting competition for a grand prize of a free registered domain name from GoDaddy for the year. For some, that's a pretty swell price.

Now the competition starts and users just post one word responses and not good quality content. Some of your senior users get a little bit fed up with the lack of good quality content and leave. When questioned about the rules of the competition, you realize that you didn't specify that you should be using long-length posts to respond and that without at least a minimum number of characters in the post, it would not qualify for the grand prize of the domain.

Now that is just a scenario that could possibly happen. Sometimes, if it is well managed and contained, a forum competition can boost activity and usually you get a user base that does stay on with the website and builds good content because they genuinely love the site.

Hope I gave some good insight!

Kino wrote:As helpful as contests are on forums, I think they can hurt them as well.

For example, let's say that you're hosting a posting competition for a grand prize of a free registered domain name from GoDaddy for the year. For some, that's a pretty swell price.

Now the competition starts and users just post one word responses and not good quality content. Some of your senior users get a little bit fed up with the lack of good quality content and leave. When questioned about the rules of the competition, you realize that you didn't specify that you should be using long-length posts to respond and that without at least a minimum number of characters in the post, it would not qualify for the grand prize of the domain.

Now that is just a scenario that could possibly happen. Sometimes, if it is well managed and contained, a forum competition can boost activity and usually you get a user base that does stay on with the website and builds good content because they genuinely love the site.

Hope I gave some good insight!

I do agree with you that something like that can happen if the contest isn't managed right.

On my forum though, there is a rule that you have to have a certain amount of words in each post or it is considered useless spam. That is one of the normal rules that I have on my forum, regardless if I'm hosting a contest or not. I added that rules to the set of rules the day I opened up the forum I run because I don't like having useless spam running wild on my forum.