Good Contests to offer Members

I liked the idea in this thread:

http://www.vbwebmaster.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1933

Do you guys have any other suggestions for some good contests that will help boost membership?

Yeah.
You can run a contest saying, a free gift of worth $$ to a person reaching "given number of" posts first.

or, a free site to a person reaching this much posts first....

Or, pay them to make each posts!

You can run a contest saying, a free gift of worth $$ to a person reaching "given number of" posts first.I tried this but it lead to lot's of short worthless replies and such. You might do better with designing the award for the member who has the most new threads with a minumum word count for each thread started. Have'nt tried it but sometimes more threads are needed instead of a hundred short replies to an old thread.

I hope this is not considered self-promotion, but I just recently wrote about a forums contest I did in my blog (http://www.webhostingreport.net/blog/archives/2006/04/21/forum-contests/).

Another forums admin had shared the original idea and I modified it for my own forums. It pretty much works with the time frame passing between two postings. If a message does not get a reply in a certain amount of time that user moved in the finals. The contest runs for 6 weeks and goes from 2 hours down to 5 minutes between postings.

The contest generated over 4,000 postings for my forum so far. Users seem to become addicted. Read more details in my blog (http://www.webhostingreport.net/blog/archives/2006/04/21/forum-contests/).

Christoph

Hmm, that is a nice idea, it sure would keep the members posting ...