How can I increase the quality of content of people who post here, or in any forum, for that matter?
It seems that so many people who post in these Internet Marketing forums are just doing so for the signature links, or to promote their own brand, or posting for posting's sake as opposed to truly taking time, energy and effort into caring about what they write.
What can I do to attract a higher quality audience who actually cares about sharing information with others?
Hmm first of all you biggest problem is that you don't have qualified people. I just take a look on Java forum, they can't give proper answer because they don't know it. Try to find "expert" for every "topic" and make him admin for that special area, when I see that someone answer me in 5-10 minute on my question and that answer did help me, I'll be back for sure...
We definitely do have at least a couple of experts in every category ... except for the Internet marketing one. (They may not always be online, or be interested in your particular question, however.)
For example, the top of the Java section has avatars of our biggest Java experts :)
I guess I didn't explain myself fully. I was targeting my question towards this particular Internet marketing section of DaniWeb.
Continuing milil's tangent, there are experts in the Java forum, for example. However, the questions on average are gradually becoming dumber, lazier, and a waste of time. So encouraging experts to participate more often should start with ensuring that quality questions are asked.
The problem is that this is difficult without introducing draconian policies that push non-experts away.
To the topic of this thread, I agree that Internet Marketing is spam bait. Maybe change the name, be very clear about the intention of the forum, and introduce the same moderation policy we have for the Viruses, Spyware and Other Nasties forum to ensure high quality. Anything that doesn't strictly conform to the posting policy gets deleted with extreme prejudice.
And if that doesn't work (ie. activity drops to nothing), kill the forum.
Q: What can I do to improve the quality of content in my forum?
A: Kill content that doesn't live up to your quality standards and if there's nothing left, just kill the forum.
Sorry but that seems like a non-constructive answer IMHO.
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