What's more important: members or posts?

[AlexIsaacs]

When you get to many members people seem to compete for post more and more spam happens.
Some members even become territorial and either ignore or are plain rude to any new members that post or join the site.
Also i think groups make this even worse when one person in the group gets into a debate with someone outside the group other members of that group go into attack mode on this member.
Usually the group wins and chases away that member and other members eventually making the site go into a slow death(staff members will usually side with the group too thinking they are more important).

Well if you have thousands of members nobody cares about the loss of a single one that will most likely return if he was active anyway and if he wasn't active in the first place then once again, nobody will care that he leaves.

[die4me]

So that means new members are not important  and members who don't contribute a lot of post are worthless then.

[aldo]

When you get to many members people seem to compete for post more and more spam happens.
Some members even become territorial and either ignore or are plain rude to any new members that post or join the site.
Also i think groups make this even worse when one person in the group gets into a debate with someone outside the group other members of that group go into attack mode on this member.
Usually the group wins and chases away that member and other members eventually making the site go into a slow death(staff members will usually side with the group too thinking they are more important).

Well if you have thousands of members nobody cares about the loss of a single one that will most likely return if he was active anyway and if he wasn't active in the first place then once again, nobody will care that he leaves.

Yeah but thats not good... Soon you could get the rep that new comers aren't allowed. Why would people want to join?

[AlexIsaacs]

So that means new members are not important  and members who don't contribute a lot of post are worthless then.

Members who don't contribute ARE worthless. And yes on huge forums, new members are worthless as well. THe larger the forum, the more you have to do to establish yourself as a personality there, but the more reward there is for doing so.

Example: I can be top-score simply by signing up at a forum with 5 members and posting a few times. It might take me a few weeks or even a month to accomplish the same thing on a forum with 500 members, and a few months with a couple thousand members. It can take years on a board with, let's say, 200,000 members.

So yes, the larger the forum the more useless a newbie becomes and people who never post are always worthless.

[Uhura!]

Although my forum is not humongous (52928 Posts in 3327 Topics by 110 Members)....I purge people who have a zero post count after 2 weeks.

Some forum owners keep those people on the rolls to make their forum look big - but I figure What's the point? Our # of posts is pretty high for being just a year old....

[1MileCrash]

I think posts are more important. I have over 12,000 members but only 130,000 posts, which is not a good ratio. Though, most of my posts are good quality.

[anunlike]

I'd have to say that it ultimately depends on the forum; it's goal / mission, ideal demographic and so on.

You know, if I'm running a forum that's supposed to be more of an academic / educational / formal / etc. one, especially if it's about one rather specific subject matter, I'd perhaps want a select demographic. I may want one that knows and has an interest in the subject matter better and more than the general public, one that can provide links, references, etc. to research and so on. I'd still want quantity, but quality would be just as important for one like that.

That's much different than more generalized forums.