Dave and I have been noticing that free members are posting somewhat prolificly, and almost exclusively to market-related threads.
Because of this, we're soon going to implement a kind of "rewards" program for our market-posting free members.
The first idea I'm going to implement is roughly something like this:
1. Once you've posted 100 messages to market-related threads, your account will appear on a listing for Dave's review. If he feels that your posts have largely been relevant and good contributions to the community (as opposed to a bunch of one-liners to get your post count up), he'll approve your account for an increase to 10 posts per day.
2. Once you've posted 500 messages (same criteria), you'll appear on Dave's list again for an increase to 20 posts per day.
3. At the 1000 message mark, we'll turn on a subset of premium features. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking message searching (not Advanced) and one or two smaller features that're still nice to have.
We want to use this as a way to acknowledge that we appreciate market-related content.
I'm also hashing out some ideas to similarly reward our Grandfathered, Lifetime, and Renewable Subscription members for prolific, relevant (market-related in market-related threads) posts. Perhaps the inclusion of features reserved only for those people. Heck, maybe t-shirts or other souvenirs, or even cash.
For purposes of defining "prolific" for these new programs, once they're implemented, we'll be backdating to 9/24/04, when this version of the site went live.
I need to give Investors Hub about a week of "programming love", as it's fallen behind SI now in terms of some features, but once I'm done, I'll spend about a week finishing up some things on SI (completing Ignore is at the top of the list, along with a few other items), then will work on implementing the above programs.
If anyone has any other ideas for helping to increase our market-related posting volume, I'd love to hear them. The site can now handle the traffic (the old version would've quickly failed with much more traffic) and from the business perspective, content has replaced programming as the top priority for the site. |
