A Must-Read Article For Website Activity

[Liam.]

http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/increase-your-user-activity-with-points-badges-and-status/

I enjoyed this read, and hope you will to Six Revisions have lots of other great articles like this aswell...

[Tanks]

Great link - I  ended up reading multiple articles

[Liam.]

Same, the evil powers of links But I ended up reading several good articles; they're all quite interesting ^_^

[Ensiferous]

If things like this interest you then you should also look into things like Skinner's Box, there's great research there which will help you understand how to abuse your users. My own experience is that as you grow in user size this is going to annoy you, though. The world is full of idiots, and there is no way your forum is going to steer clear, so eventually all your game theory and manipulations are going to cause users to post spam and you'll need a huge amount of admin work to keep it down. (This is known as the Eternal September

It's great for getting activity, but I personally toned it down a lot when I started getting a lot of activity.