acers
31st December 2006, 08:48 PM
Irrespective of whatever type of site you have, or however old it is; one of things that you as a webmaster would always look forward to is getting new members, promoting your board and keeping a captive member-base.
One of the best ways of doing this is organizing community contests. Community contests are a great way to achieve a lot of good things and can benefit all type of sites:
New Site: Its is a sure shot way of promoting your board. People are inherently attracted towards something that they will get for free or with minimal effort.
Old but Active Site: Its a great way of keeping your existing members of board involved and have a "feel good" effect on your board. Plus you also ensure that some other competitor is not able to steal your member-base by aggressive marketing.
Old but non-active site: A lot of sites start big, get members and then slowly lose them.(or in some cases keep getting members but they don't return) There can be a variety of reasons for this and while in such cases its also important to take hard look at what you have on offer on your board and maybe invest a bit more of time(and money if needed!) on making your board look better and snappier with better content, the surest way of getting your already registered members to come back with a bang is a contest that will compel them to come, post and see the changes(and hopefully the changes that you have done, will please them and they will start being active)Now that you know how good contests can be for your board, we come to the difficult part. Thinking of having a contest is one thing, but actually benefiting from them is quite another. For long i have seen(from my own experiences of running 4 totally unrelated community sites and being a active member on hundreds of others) that if not properly implemented and tracked, a contest will turn out to be a complete waste of time and money. Remember, a good contest requires
Watching trends and people behavior on your forums (and on competing forums too!) Find out what they like, what would interest them and what can you offer them as prize.
A clear understanding of what your aims are and what you want to achieve with the contest. Different contests achieve different results. A contest suitable for brand building might not be a good one for getting new members(more about it later)
A regular tracking and monitoring of the contest once it starts and then at the end of the contest also.Now that we know what has to be done, lets get down to the details about how to do it. For purpose of segregation, i have chosen to divide the contests into 2 broad categories. Hard Prize Contest and Soft Prize Contest. The categorization is neither rigid nor authoritative and is certainly pretty unique(no wonder about that, i just invented them :D:cool:)
Without further adieu, lets move to the details and types of contests:
Hard Prize Contests
These contests will normally involve you giving your winners something of monetary value as the prize.
Referral Contest
What: A referral contest involves asking your board members to invite their friends over to your site and make them sign up as registered members. At the end of the contest period, the person with maximum referrals is the winner.
When to Have: Usually the best contest to have when your site is new and you want to attract new members and build a member base quickly.
What to offer: Nature of the contest means that there is not much effort required on part of the contest taker. All he has to do is to send emails to his friends with referring url and as soon as they sign up, he will be credited with a referral score. Keeping this in mind, you can get away with a small prize also. It can be anything from a 10$ rapidshare pass to a free magazine subscription(around 20$) to even a small gadget. Avoid giving very costly prizes due to reasons i will explain below. Instead try to offer 3 same prizes.(to top 3 winners) or top 5 as you may wish.
Pitfalls: The contest might look very good and a great way to attract people, unfortunately have this contest with a pinch of salt. It is extremely easy to rig inspite of your best efforts. Here is how people rig the contest
Start registering themselves using different email ids.
Use proxy servers to register with multiple id's
resort to spamming via emails and flood friends and foe's email with a link to your site which in most cases is bad pr for your site.(even if it might actually bring some traffic.)Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Make sure you have image verification turned on(to avoid bots to mass register)
I strongly advice having email verification on also. This contest is pointless otherwise as inventing emails is the easiest thing to do. With email verification, the rigger has to take time off to register a new account, activate it and also(if you are actively monitoring contest) invent unrelated email ids also.
Have these hacks installed before you start: (Referral id in postbit (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=90849&page=9)) (Referral Stats (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=101000) OR Referral Stats (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=102452))
Make sure that you have the initial referrals written down before you start this competition. Its the easiest thing to forget. and mighty unfair to everyone if you realize it later. Take a screenshot of the referral counts of everyone before you start. (just in case people ask you later)
Monitor monitor monitor. Yes you cannot let this contest drift. You won't even realize when things went wrong. If the prize is good people will go to any extent and waste hell of a lot of time in false registrations(they will use hard to find proxies, invent emails, register new accounts, and actually post also to make the new signup's look genuine) Make sure you watch out for: (1) Too many registrations from same guy. First warning. Track the guys he is referring. check the emails. Usually he will be dumb enough to use emails like amanda1@asd.com; amanda2@asd.com; you should immediately suspect him and confront him (2) Check the IP of the guys he is registering. If the IP's are same for a lot of them(please note some IP's can be genuine for people on shared lan) and/or if they match with open proxies, start suspecting the guy. Here (http://www.publicproxyservers.com/) and here (http://www.samair.ru/proxy/) is a handy list of latest open proxies. (3) Suspect everyone. Thats the key and pm the guy if you suspect anything shady immediately. It will for starters tell that guy you are on to him, plus he can explain himself.
One of the reasons to have multiple same prizes was to decrease a bit of motivation of riggers to outdo each other for the first prize. So if you have 1st prize as 100$ and second as 20$, people will go all out for 1st prize and in more cases than not, even those who would have played fairly, resort to unfair practices cos they see one guy doing it unchecked. (one rotten apple spoils the whole basket as the old adage goes!) This won't mean there won't be rigging, but this will avoid strong rigging from some people(and usually its 3-4 guys only that will have the time in hand to do IP/email based rigging.
For reasons already mentioned above, its a good idea to have small prizes. Have something people will like(it depends on your site so if its a games site a download site pass might do the trick while for a xbox site offer a mag subscription)What you gain: A referral contest even if rigged will give your board a feel of high activity. New members coming from google or otherwise always look at how popular your board is for an indication. So a referral contest helps you big time there. If properly organized(and if you are able to control the rigging!) you also will get your board advertised to a lot of people and over time these people will start posting. Plus you get to have it all very quickly.
How long to have: Give atleast a fortnight for this contest and ideally a month.
After the contest: Referral contest will get you members, but if your site is bad, no one will stick around. Keep site updated all the time. Ask the site staff to post good news, articles regularly. Feed the new members content to reply to. And one major thing, utilize email notification about interesting things on your site to regularly inform new members after the contest to keep them coming back.
Content Writing Contest
What: A content writing contest involves asking your members to write articles, submit news or related stuff and post on your site. The winner is decided based on the quality and/or in some cases based on the quantity of submissions.
When to Have: This is not a good contest to have on a brand new site. The contest inherently appeals to people who will take the trouble and have the time to post things. And if the submissions have to be original(which is the case, avoid duplicate stuff, its bad for SEO) then it requires a helluva lot of effort also. So have this contest when your board has atleast a decent number of members (500+) as in that case you will have some people at the minimum who will take time off and post. This is also a good contest to have on bigger sites when you want good quality and original content, or just when you want to give something back to your members.
What to offer: This contest demands good prizes. For two reasons. One its a tough contest and if the prizes on offer are not good(and related to what people would associate with you site's content) they will not take the trouble to post or write original stuff. Secondly this is not a contest which is easy to rig as copy pasted stuff is usually easy to track(details below). The contest prizes should depend on what you are asking. If for say you
are asking for news submissions of max 300 words then the prizes can be low, but if you are asking authoritative articles of 3000+ words and quality ones at that, be ready to have good prizes to make people post that. The contest prizes also depend on how much you narrow down the scope of content to be posted. So eg. if you want members to post content on anything related to "community building software", you can expect more entries for same prize, but if you want content specific to "vbulletin" and your site has people from all the community board software, obviously a lot of people will not be able to participate and you need good prizes to lure others. I would reckon anything over 100$+ for the first prize in this contest to attract people.
Pitfalls: Die hard riggers will always try to dupe you here also. And especially if the prize is good. No one likes writing own original articles so be ready for:
Copy pasting. Yep everyone is smart enough not to copy paste word by word. So they will change first line, last line, jumble up the middle, and post what seemingly looks like a original article.
People will post from places you won't have ever heard about. Or they will copy from places which require a guy to sign up to view content(and chances are you won't know about the place and neither will google)
People are lazy. yes even on active sites. And asking them to post on specific topics mostly will mean that they will stay away.(and more so if the prizes are not worth it) So don't expect a flood of original content even on busy active sites.
This is not the kind of contest that will make the newbies and guest register on the site. This is not hard and fast rule but usually new guys don't write huge articles(and original ones) and are at best scared by the other "Gurus" on your board and usually think they don't stand a chance against the competition.Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Create a new forum or section for the contest. It will help you to categorize content. Plus its easier to move the content later once the contest is over to proper sections
Decide on the selection process of the winner. Are you going to choose the winner by a staff vote or let all the community members do so via a open poll(open to rigging again unless you restrict the poll to senior members).
Make a decision if you are going to allow members to see each other's posts during the contest period. Allowing all to view each others posts might mean some members may complain that someone else stole the idea of their own, while not allowing others to see the threads might mean that lot of people might post the same thing or on same topic which might not be what you want. (On vbulletin achieving the latter is easy. Go to the forum permissions under "Forums and Moderators" and choose the forum you have set for contest and select "Registered Users". Then set permissions as shown in this image (http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=permissionsoc1.jpg). Now set the permission for "guests" and "users awaiting activation" same as above.)
Monitor the contest. Golden rule is still valid. Although in this case you can leave it to run and monitor the contest at end(but then be prepared for lot of checking.) Now what we have to look for in this contest is copy paste stuff. There are two ways to do this. The best way is that you know the sites related to the content you have asked for and you can spot the copy yourself. The other way is electronically. There is an excellent solution available in the form of CopyScape (http://www.copyscape.com/) that does the finding work for you. An excellent guide on using this site is available here (http://www.techenclave.com/forums/check-for-plagiarised-content-83557.html).What you gain: A content writing competition will give you quality content and also original content. For bigger sites, this contest also ensures that you are rewarding the guys who do the work for free regularly and will keep them motivated and happy with your board. However, this is not a competition for newbies so don't expect new members registering for this and posting on your site.
How long to have: At least a month and maximum time also around that. Original writing takes pretty long to write and people might want to revise and edit their submission over time. Give them plenty of time to think out the article and accumulate any content they might need for the article.
After the contest: Move the content submitted to proper sections. Close the forum for the contest after that(if you wish) and also personally thank each member who contributed articles for the competition. This is a must. Its not the same as saying thanks in a thread. A personal thanks will make the members feel good and they will be motivated to post with increased vigor next time around. If possible try to talk to them about the content they wrote to give it that extra personal touch which tells them you actually read the thing (don't laugh, some people don't read the threads also )
Short Quiz Contest
What: A contest where you are asking simple questions or conducting a quiz which is related to your site and is easy in difficulty. At the end of the time period, a random winner is selected from all those who gave the correct answer.
When to Have: You can have this contest at any time and any site can have it. New site or a pretty old site, this contest is sure to attract everybody. Thats because if what you have asked in the quiz is of moderate to simple difficulty OR the answers are well known, then a lot of people will take a bit of time to search(your forums or google) to find the correct answer and post it. The essence here is that you are asking things that people normally should know who will visit your site(or are interested in the genre of your site) or are easy to find on your forum. To give an example a gaming console site can have a simple quiz on latest features of ps3(which can be easily found from say a thread on your site).
What to offer: Slightly dependent on the quiz and the level of quiz. If the quiz is very easy then you can get away with cheap prizes also(20$+, mag subscription, download passes etc) For tougher quizzes, you might want to offer slightly bigger prizes although don't spend too much as there is inherent rigging scope in this contest.
Pitfalls: This is a riggers delight contest. There are number of ways to rig and frankly when you have this contest you already know that but you will still have it cos it will compel normal members and newbies to participate also.
Multiple submissions from different id's of same user.
Rigger leaking the answers. So even if the quiz was slightly tough or involved the guy to search your board for answer, the rigger will leak the answer on IM's, different sites ensuring that people won't have to do anything and just paste the answer.Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Decide on the level of difficulty of the contest. If its based on something that people have to search for on your board and find answers to, make sure you do a test run of the same to see how tough or easy it is to do. Better would be to ask a friend to do it to see how he fares.
Decide how you will accept the submission. You can either accept them via pm to a central coordinator of the contest(be sure that you give this user plenty of pm space before you ask him to start accepting entries) OR you can have it in a new forum. Set the question as an announcement in that forum and ask members to make a new thread with the answer. You can use the same permissions as i highlighted above(see image)
Advertise big time. Send email telling all existing members about the contest. Have banner on your portal. Mention the simplicity of the contest in both banner and email; and tell users what they can win if they know the answer.
Since this contest is just to promote your board, make sure you and your board staff keep posting new quality stuff during the contest duration that will keep new people who come for the contest interested. Better idea is to build the content one week in advance of the contest as by the time you will start the contest, you will already have something new members can see and look at.(this is very important for new sites trying this contest out)What you gain: A good deal of participation, activity on forum(as lot of people will come to take part and new member registrations.
How long to have: Depends entirely on you. You can have this even for a day. Don't stretch it over a long period though. It will lose its charm very fast. OR have prizes everyday to be won. Thats one great way to attract members to keep coming back to your board every day hoping for the prize.
After the contest: Have quality content and keep the new members and the people that were not active but came to your board because of the contest involved. You cannot have the contest running all the time(or can you!!) so make sure you back up the contest with quality and interesting articles, news on your site.
Randomizer Contest
What: The basic philosophy in this contest is to choose a person at random who fulfill and certain set criteria set by you and that person at the end wins the prize.
When to Have: Best suited again for a new site. This contest gives new users and members a chance to win. However this is not restrictive and even bigger sites can have this based on the criteria for randomized selection. Newer sites might for example want to choose all the persons who have posted more than 30 posts during the contest period and randomly select one from among them. Bigger sites can randomize from those who submit more than a set number of reviews per month and select one from among those.
What to offer: Anything goes for new sites. The mantra there is again keep the prizes low but attractive enough. For bigger sites, have a good prize if you want people to post quality(and not spam). Again the choice depends on the type of randomized contest. I am assuming something based on posts or threads in specific forum. It can be on plain registrations(no set criteria), reputation score and so on..
Pitfalls: ahmmm...
Massive spamming. If its based on post counts, expect lot of spam from people trying to achieve the requisite number of posts. Ditto for reputation score where people will start literally begging for reputation from other fellow members.
On newer sites, bogus registration site problem will be there again.(depending on what the criteria you have set for the contest.)Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Decide on the criteria that will best suit your board. Be sure that you are ready for the spam fest also. So if its a post criteria, your mods should be ready to handle tons of spam.
Find out or get a script coded that will allow you to first find the users based on the criteria you have set and then randomly select one. Usually this can be done via a simple query. eg to find people who have posted in last 7 days and how many posts they have posted we can have SELECT count(*) as totposts, user.username FROM post as post
LEFT JOIN user as user on (user.userid = post.userid)
WHERE post.dateline > (1167580124-7*86400)
GROUP BY user.userid
ORDER BY totposts DESC (1167580124 is existing timestamp). Its not hard to code the script as per your requirement and if you can't do it, ask any coder for help.What you gain: Inspite of the fact that you will get a lot of spam with this type of contest, your main aim of activity on the board should be achieved
How long to have: Entirely dependent on you.
After the contest: If its successful, maybe plan for next one :D
Important things for all the above contests:
Stick to the contest once you announce it. Believe me, nothing, absolutely nothing will hurt you more than a canceled contest midway or worse a contest where you fail to deliver the prizes to the winner after contest is over. The trust that you enjoy will be lost and most of the members, even those who don't participate will come out against you.
In case some sponsor is giving the prizes for the contest, try to ensure that the sponsor won't back out midway. Explain the full contest in advance to the sponsor and tell him clearly what you expect the response would be(honest opinion) It will prevent problems later.
Don't, Don't have a site downtime in the middle of the contest. Do all the upgrades, hack additions and site designing before the contest starts. Nothing annoys members more than having a downtime in the middle of contest. Also avoid changing the skin or design of the site midway of a contest.
Promote your contest hard. Contest is useless if people don't come to know about it. Use emails to tell all your members, friends and if possible and if you have the money, put ads on other sites dealing with your genre about the contest.
Soft Prize Contest
These are the contests that will not have monetary prizes but instead appeal to people due to some other reasons.
I will go over the contests possible in this group in brief (the guide has become a bit too long anyway and i doubt anyone is reading it by now :D)
Member of the Week/Month -: Every member wants himself to be in the spotlight. Try having weekly or monthly contests to select a member by voting and then put his name(and avatar and some other personal writeup about that member if possible) on the forum front page. This will make that person feel important and also motivate other members to strive to reach the same position.
Access to hidden sections -: If your site has certain subscription only sections or paid sections(torrent sites usually have these) then this could be a good incentive for a contest. You can have any of the "Hard Prize Contest" as detailed above with this as the prize.
Featured thread -: This works almost the same way as member of the month so far as your members are concerned. Its appealing to them to post quality content to be listed on the main page. A hack (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=128644) on vb.org is available that will do this for youAnd thats about it. Almost everything i have mentioned above is based on my own experiences running contests on different community sites with the sole purpose of attracting new people promoting my board. I dare say in most cases we learnt these lessons the hard way. I hope you all profit from some of my experiences. At the end of the day, what a good contest will do to your board, absolutely nothing else will achieve. Just try to manage the contest well and enjoy!!
One of the best ways of doing this is organizing community contests. Community contests are a great way to achieve a lot of good things and can benefit all type of sites:
New Site: Its is a sure shot way of promoting your board. People are inherently attracted towards something that they will get for free or with minimal effort.
Old but Active Site: Its a great way of keeping your existing members of board involved and have a "feel good" effect on your board. Plus you also ensure that some other competitor is not able to steal your member-base by aggressive marketing.
Old but non-active site: A lot of sites start big, get members and then slowly lose them.(or in some cases keep getting members but they don't return) There can be a variety of reasons for this and while in such cases its also important to take hard look at what you have on offer on your board and maybe invest a bit more of time(and money if needed!) on making your board look better and snappier with better content, the surest way of getting your already registered members to come back with a bang is a contest that will compel them to come, post and see the changes(and hopefully the changes that you have done, will please them and they will start being active)Now that you know how good contests can be for your board, we come to the difficult part. Thinking of having a contest is one thing, but actually benefiting from them is quite another. For long i have seen(from my own experiences of running 4 totally unrelated community sites and being a active member on hundreds of others) that if not properly implemented and tracked, a contest will turn out to be a complete waste of time and money. Remember, a good contest requires
Watching trends and people behavior on your forums (and on competing forums too!) Find out what they like, what would interest them and what can you offer them as prize.
A clear understanding of what your aims are and what you want to achieve with the contest. Different contests achieve different results. A contest suitable for brand building might not be a good one for getting new members(more about it later)
A regular tracking and monitoring of the contest once it starts and then at the end of the contest also.Now that we know what has to be done, lets get down to the details about how to do it. For purpose of segregation, i have chosen to divide the contests into 2 broad categories. Hard Prize Contest and Soft Prize Contest. The categorization is neither rigid nor authoritative and is certainly pretty unique(no wonder about that, i just invented them :D:cool:)
Without further adieu, lets move to the details and types of contests:
Hard Prize Contests
These contests will normally involve you giving your winners something of monetary value as the prize.
Referral Contest
What: A referral contest involves asking your board members to invite their friends over to your site and make them sign up as registered members. At the end of the contest period, the person with maximum referrals is the winner.
When to Have: Usually the best contest to have when your site is new and you want to attract new members and build a member base quickly.
What to offer: Nature of the contest means that there is not much effort required on part of the contest taker. All he has to do is to send emails to his friends with referring url and as soon as they sign up, he will be credited with a referral score. Keeping this in mind, you can get away with a small prize also. It can be anything from a 10$ rapidshare pass to a free magazine subscription(around 20$) to even a small gadget. Avoid giving very costly prizes due to reasons i will explain below. Instead try to offer 3 same prizes.(to top 3 winners) or top 5 as you may wish.
Pitfalls: The contest might look very good and a great way to attract people, unfortunately have this contest with a pinch of salt. It is extremely easy to rig inspite of your best efforts. Here is how people rig the contest
Start registering themselves using different email ids.
Use proxy servers to register with multiple id's
resort to spamming via emails and flood friends and foe's email with a link to your site which in most cases is bad pr for your site.(even if it might actually bring some traffic.)Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Make sure you have image verification turned on(to avoid bots to mass register)
I strongly advice having email verification on also. This contest is pointless otherwise as inventing emails is the easiest thing to do. With email verification, the rigger has to take time off to register a new account, activate it and also(if you are actively monitoring contest) invent unrelated email ids also.
Have these hacks installed before you start: (Referral id in postbit (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=90849&page=9)) (Referral Stats (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=101000) OR Referral Stats (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=102452))
Make sure that you have the initial referrals written down before you start this competition. Its the easiest thing to forget. and mighty unfair to everyone if you realize it later. Take a screenshot of the referral counts of everyone before you start. (just in case people ask you later)
Monitor monitor monitor. Yes you cannot let this contest drift. You won't even realize when things went wrong. If the prize is good people will go to any extent and waste hell of a lot of time in false registrations(they will use hard to find proxies, invent emails, register new accounts, and actually post also to make the new signup's look genuine) Make sure you watch out for: (1) Too many registrations from same guy. First warning. Track the guys he is referring. check the emails. Usually he will be dumb enough to use emails like amanda1@asd.com; amanda2@asd.com; you should immediately suspect him and confront him (2) Check the IP of the guys he is registering. If the IP's are same for a lot of them(please note some IP's can be genuine for people on shared lan) and/or if they match with open proxies, start suspecting the guy. Here (http://www.publicproxyservers.com/) and here (http://www.samair.ru/proxy/) is a handy list of latest open proxies. (3) Suspect everyone. Thats the key and pm the guy if you suspect anything shady immediately. It will for starters tell that guy you are on to him, plus he can explain himself.
One of the reasons to have multiple same prizes was to decrease a bit of motivation of riggers to outdo each other for the first prize. So if you have 1st prize as 100$ and second as 20$, people will go all out for 1st prize and in more cases than not, even those who would have played fairly, resort to unfair practices cos they see one guy doing it unchecked. (one rotten apple spoils the whole basket as the old adage goes!) This won't mean there won't be rigging, but this will avoid strong rigging from some people(and usually its 3-4 guys only that will have the time in hand to do IP/email based rigging.
For reasons already mentioned above, its a good idea to have small prizes. Have something people will like(it depends on your site so if its a games site a download site pass might do the trick while for a xbox site offer a mag subscription)What you gain: A referral contest even if rigged will give your board a feel of high activity. New members coming from google or otherwise always look at how popular your board is for an indication. So a referral contest helps you big time there. If properly organized(and if you are able to control the rigging!) you also will get your board advertised to a lot of people and over time these people will start posting. Plus you get to have it all very quickly.
How long to have: Give atleast a fortnight for this contest and ideally a month.
After the contest: Referral contest will get you members, but if your site is bad, no one will stick around. Keep site updated all the time. Ask the site staff to post good news, articles regularly. Feed the new members content to reply to. And one major thing, utilize email notification about interesting things on your site to regularly inform new members after the contest to keep them coming back.
Content Writing Contest
What: A content writing contest involves asking your members to write articles, submit news or related stuff and post on your site. The winner is decided based on the quality and/or in some cases based on the quantity of submissions.
When to Have: This is not a good contest to have on a brand new site. The contest inherently appeals to people who will take the trouble and have the time to post things. And if the submissions have to be original(which is the case, avoid duplicate stuff, its bad for SEO) then it requires a helluva lot of effort also. So have this contest when your board has atleast a decent number of members (500+) as in that case you will have some people at the minimum who will take time off and post. This is also a good contest to have on bigger sites when you want good quality and original content, or just when you want to give something back to your members.
What to offer: This contest demands good prizes. For two reasons. One its a tough contest and if the prizes on offer are not good(and related to what people would associate with you site's content) they will not take the trouble to post or write original stuff. Secondly this is not a contest which is easy to rig as copy pasted stuff is usually easy to track(details below). The contest prizes should depend on what you are asking. If for say you
are asking for news submissions of max 300 words then the prizes can be low, but if you are asking authoritative articles of 3000+ words and quality ones at that, be ready to have good prizes to make people post that. The contest prizes also depend on how much you narrow down the scope of content to be posted. So eg. if you want members to post content on anything related to "community building software", you can expect more entries for same prize, but if you want content specific to "vbulletin" and your site has people from all the community board software, obviously a lot of people will not be able to participate and you need good prizes to lure others. I would reckon anything over 100$+ for the first prize in this contest to attract people.
Pitfalls: Die hard riggers will always try to dupe you here also. And especially if the prize is good. No one likes writing own original articles so be ready for:
Copy pasting. Yep everyone is smart enough not to copy paste word by word. So they will change first line, last line, jumble up the middle, and post what seemingly looks like a original article.
People will post from places you won't have ever heard about. Or they will copy from places which require a guy to sign up to view content(and chances are you won't know about the place and neither will google)
People are lazy. yes even on active sites. And asking them to post on specific topics mostly will mean that they will stay away.(and more so if the prizes are not worth it) So don't expect a flood of original content even on busy active sites.
This is not the kind of contest that will make the newbies and guest register on the site. This is not hard and fast rule but usually new guys don't write huge articles(and original ones) and are at best scared by the other "Gurus" on your board and usually think they don't stand a chance against the competition.Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Create a new forum or section for the contest. It will help you to categorize content. Plus its easier to move the content later once the contest is over to proper sections
Decide on the selection process of the winner. Are you going to choose the winner by a staff vote or let all the community members do so via a open poll(open to rigging again unless you restrict the poll to senior members).
Make a decision if you are going to allow members to see each other's posts during the contest period. Allowing all to view each others posts might mean some members may complain that someone else stole the idea of their own, while not allowing others to see the threads might mean that lot of people might post the same thing or on same topic which might not be what you want. (On vbulletin achieving the latter is easy. Go to the forum permissions under "Forums and Moderators" and choose the forum you have set for contest and select "Registered Users". Then set permissions as shown in this image (http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=permissionsoc1.jpg). Now set the permission for "guests" and "users awaiting activation" same as above.)
Monitor the contest. Golden rule is still valid. Although in this case you can leave it to run and monitor the contest at end(but then be prepared for lot of checking.) Now what we have to look for in this contest is copy paste stuff. There are two ways to do this. The best way is that you know the sites related to the content you have asked for and you can spot the copy yourself. The other way is electronically. There is an excellent solution available in the form of CopyScape (http://www.copyscape.com/) that does the finding work for you. An excellent guide on using this site is available here (http://www.techenclave.com/forums/check-for-plagiarised-content-83557.html).What you gain: A content writing competition will give you quality content and also original content. For bigger sites, this contest also ensures that you are rewarding the guys who do the work for free regularly and will keep them motivated and happy with your board. However, this is not a competition for newbies so don't expect new members registering for this and posting on your site.
How long to have: At least a month and maximum time also around that. Original writing takes pretty long to write and people might want to revise and edit their submission over time. Give them plenty of time to think out the article and accumulate any content they might need for the article.
After the contest: Move the content submitted to proper sections. Close the forum for the contest after that(if you wish) and also personally thank each member who contributed articles for the competition. This is a must. Its not the same as saying thanks in a thread. A personal thanks will make the members feel good and they will be motivated to post with increased vigor next time around. If possible try to talk to them about the content they wrote to give it that extra personal touch which tells them you actually read the thing (don't laugh, some people don't read the threads also )
Short Quiz Contest
What: A contest where you are asking simple questions or conducting a quiz which is related to your site and is easy in difficulty. At the end of the time period, a random winner is selected from all those who gave the correct answer.
When to Have: You can have this contest at any time and any site can have it. New site or a pretty old site, this contest is sure to attract everybody. Thats because if what you have asked in the quiz is of moderate to simple difficulty OR the answers are well known, then a lot of people will take a bit of time to search(your forums or google) to find the correct answer and post it. The essence here is that you are asking things that people normally should know who will visit your site(or are interested in the genre of your site) or are easy to find on your forum. To give an example a gaming console site can have a simple quiz on latest features of ps3(which can be easily found from say a thread on your site).
What to offer: Slightly dependent on the quiz and the level of quiz. If the quiz is very easy then you can get away with cheap prizes also(20$+, mag subscription, download passes etc) For tougher quizzes, you might want to offer slightly bigger prizes although don't spend too much as there is inherent rigging scope in this contest.
Pitfalls: This is a riggers delight contest. There are number of ways to rig and frankly when you have this contest you already know that but you will still have it cos it will compel normal members and newbies to participate also.
Multiple submissions from different id's of same user.
Rigger leaking the answers. So even if the quiz was slightly tough or involved the guy to search your board for answer, the rigger will leak the answer on IM's, different sites ensuring that people won't have to do anything and just paste the answer.Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Decide on the level of difficulty of the contest. If its based on something that people have to search for on your board and find answers to, make sure you do a test run of the same to see how tough or easy it is to do. Better would be to ask a friend to do it to see how he fares.
Decide how you will accept the submission. You can either accept them via pm to a central coordinator of the contest(be sure that you give this user plenty of pm space before you ask him to start accepting entries) OR you can have it in a new forum. Set the question as an announcement in that forum and ask members to make a new thread with the answer. You can use the same permissions as i highlighted above(see image)
Advertise big time. Send email telling all existing members about the contest. Have banner on your portal. Mention the simplicity of the contest in both banner and email; and tell users what they can win if they know the answer.
Since this contest is just to promote your board, make sure you and your board staff keep posting new quality stuff during the contest duration that will keep new people who come for the contest interested. Better idea is to build the content one week in advance of the contest as by the time you will start the contest, you will already have something new members can see and look at.(this is very important for new sites trying this contest out)What you gain: A good deal of participation, activity on forum(as lot of people will come to take part and new member registrations.
How long to have: Depends entirely on you. You can have this even for a day. Don't stretch it over a long period though. It will lose its charm very fast. OR have prizes everyday to be won. Thats one great way to attract members to keep coming back to your board every day hoping for the prize.
After the contest: Have quality content and keep the new members and the people that were not active but came to your board because of the contest involved. You cannot have the contest running all the time(or can you!!) so make sure you back up the contest with quality and interesting articles, news on your site.
Randomizer Contest
What: The basic philosophy in this contest is to choose a person at random who fulfill and certain set criteria set by you and that person at the end wins the prize.
When to Have: Best suited again for a new site. This contest gives new users and members a chance to win. However this is not restrictive and even bigger sites can have this based on the criteria for randomized selection. Newer sites might for example want to choose all the persons who have posted more than 30 posts during the contest period and randomly select one from among them. Bigger sites can randomize from those who submit more than a set number of reviews per month and select one from among those.
What to offer: Anything goes for new sites. The mantra there is again keep the prizes low but attractive enough. For bigger sites, have a good prize if you want people to post quality(and not spam). Again the choice depends on the type of randomized contest. I am assuming something based on posts or threads in specific forum. It can be on plain registrations(no set criteria), reputation score and so on..
Pitfalls: ahmmm...
Massive spamming. If its based on post counts, expect lot of spam from people trying to achieve the requisite number of posts. Ditto for reputation score where people will start literally begging for reputation from other fellow members.
On newer sites, bogus registration site problem will be there again.(depending on what the criteria you have set for the contest.)Prepare your board: Before having this contest be sure to have these:
Decide on the criteria that will best suit your board. Be sure that you are ready for the spam fest also. So if its a post criteria, your mods should be ready to handle tons of spam.
Find out or get a script coded that will allow you to first find the users based on the criteria you have set and then randomly select one. Usually this can be done via a simple query. eg to find people who have posted in last 7 days and how many posts they have posted we can have SELECT count(*) as totposts, user.username FROM post as post
LEFT JOIN user as user on (user.userid = post.userid)
WHERE post.dateline > (1167580124-7*86400)
GROUP BY user.userid
ORDER BY totposts DESC (1167580124 is existing timestamp). Its not hard to code the script as per your requirement and if you can't do it, ask any coder for help.What you gain: Inspite of the fact that you will get a lot of spam with this type of contest, your main aim of activity on the board should be achieved
How long to have: Entirely dependent on you.
After the contest: If its successful, maybe plan for next one :D
Important things for all the above contests:
Stick to the contest once you announce it. Believe me, nothing, absolutely nothing will hurt you more than a canceled contest midway or worse a contest where you fail to deliver the prizes to the winner after contest is over. The trust that you enjoy will be lost and most of the members, even those who don't participate will come out against you.
In case some sponsor is giving the prizes for the contest, try to ensure that the sponsor won't back out midway. Explain the full contest in advance to the sponsor and tell him clearly what you expect the response would be(honest opinion) It will prevent problems later.
Don't, Don't have a site downtime in the middle of the contest. Do all the upgrades, hack additions and site designing before the contest starts. Nothing annoys members more than having a downtime in the middle of contest. Also avoid changing the skin or design of the site midway of a contest.
Promote your contest hard. Contest is useless if people don't come to know about it. Use emails to tell all your members, friends and if possible and if you have the money, put ads on other sites dealing with your genre about the contest.
Soft Prize Contest
These are the contests that will not have monetary prizes but instead appeal to people due to some other reasons.
I will go over the contests possible in this group in brief (the guide has become a bit too long anyway and i doubt anyone is reading it by now :D)
Member of the Week/Month -: Every member wants himself to be in the spotlight. Try having weekly or monthly contests to select a member by voting and then put his name(and avatar and some other personal writeup about that member if possible) on the forum front page. This will make that person feel important and also motivate other members to strive to reach the same position.
Access to hidden sections -: If your site has certain subscription only sections or paid sections(torrent sites usually have these) then this could be a good incentive for a contest. You can have any of the "Hard Prize Contest" as detailed above with this as the prize.
Featured thread -: This works almost the same way as member of the month so far as your members are concerned. Its appealing to them to post quality content to be listed on the main page. A hack (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=128644) on vb.org is available that will do this for youAnd thats about it. Almost everything i have mentioned above is based on my own experiences running contests on different community sites with the sole purpose of attracting new people promoting my board. I dare say in most cases we learnt these lessons the hard way. I hope you all profit from some of my experiences. At the end of the day, what a good contest will do to your board, absolutely nothing else will achieve. Just try to manage the contest well and enjoy!!