Dealing with the decline in quality forums

Lately, with so many new communities opening and failing to become anything more than a thousand post spam-fest, it makes you wonder why little to none of these forums ever succeed. The reasons are so obliviously obvious that it kind of surprises me that noone seems to catch on. I guess this thread is being written to expose these problems, and hopefully change the way people create and manage their forums.

1. Will your community be beneficial to your users?

The first thing you have to do when starting a community is to find your motive. Are you creating a community for the benefit of the market your site will cater to, or are you doing it for your pocket? If you find that your motive is to make some quick cash, stop now. A site is only as good as it's owner. Who wants to join a community who's leader isn't even interested in the subject matter? The community is (in most cases) doomed from the start. If you find that your motive is to actually benefit others, by means of informative posts, good reading, community involvement and all of those nice things that all of these new 'communities' seem to lack, then you're on your way to creating a successful communtiy.

2. Contests don't attract quality posts

It really confuses me when the owner of a new site sends me a message on MSN saying "Join the new contest on my new forum! Cash prize!". Really, what good is this doing you? People are going to visit your contest thread, consider joining in, but more than likely, they'll see through it.

Contests offering money for posts are a nice thought, but what happens when your contest is over? The posts are going to stop, and you're left with exactly what you started with: A rather large "Chit Chat" forum.

Referal contests? There's nothing stopping users from using multiple e-mail accounts to win that $25 cash prize.

My advice to you is to skip the contests and try to win users over with a unique idea, and by involving yourself in your own community. Not with your PayPal account.

3. Don't even make a General Discussion forum. Just don't.

Take a quick visit to some of these new communities I'm talking about. (I won't link to them directly since I don't feel like getting flamed, but most of you can probably think of some off the top of your head.) Compare the size of their General Discussion forum to the size of their forums that actually deal with the site's subject.

Now, I don't know about any of you, but when I visit "TalkDesign.com", I'm not visiting to comment on the person that posted above me.

4. Design is important, but not that important

For some reason, content seems to play second fiddle to design in all of these new communities. Sure, a nice design will attract users, but is it going to keep them? Not likely. Plan out your forum first, then open Photoshop, and design around what your community (not your portfolio) needs.

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I'll continue this little rant a little later, class is over and I'm pretty hungry

Regards,
Tyler