Are you currently running your own message board? Have you been thinking about starting one? For those who can answer either of these questions with a “yes,” I want to share some of my best tips for running successful forums. These have been collected thanks to my years of personal successes and failures during the golden age of the dial-up BBS and the modern era of Web-accessible forums. Why be stubborn when you can learn from the mistakes of people like me?

Successful Forums Tip #4: Positive Reinforcement

We all like to get useful and positive feedback. Without it, most of us lose motivation and, as time passes, feel less valued or even noticed. It’s especially important to remember this online, as we tend to forget that those are real people on the other side of the screen.

It’s useful to take this same concept with you onto your online forums. It works when building an online community to reward good behavior not only because it motivates the best members but also in that it demonstrates the ideal behavior for others to model.

How can this be done? There’s any number of ways and you are limited only by your own creativity. Here are a few incentives that have worked well for me:

• Allowing new members to post without moderation after a few posts
• Archiving the best quotes in a pinned thread
• Giving members witty user-titles as you get to know them better
• Giving long-term and trusted members access to hidden or exclusive forums
• Granting members permissions for larger avatars and signatures
• Promoting qualified members to forum moderators over a particular topic
• Promoting the very best moderators to global moderators over all forums
• And never underestimate the power of a public “attaboy!”

How often should you reward good behavior? If you remember your psychology classes, positive reinforcement works best on a varied-interval basis. If you reward good behavior every time it occurs, it will diminish greatly any time you forget to reward it. If you do it on a fixed basis or only after specific goals are met, good behavior will slow as rewards are overly anticipated. But if members don’t know when the rewards will be coming, they will look diligently for opportunities to shine!

I mentioned moderators briefly on the list above. Look for more details about these integral parts to your forums’ success in my next installment.

To see this and other tips in action, feel free to stop by my personal forums, TechDiscussions.com, or Lockergnome’s own forums.