Checking on competitors

So, how often do you check out your competition/competitors and see what they're doing? I'm not going to lie, I used to check out my competitors a lot when we were still competing against them for the most members online, posts and traffic. We surpassed them in all type of stats a few months ago so I don't feel the need to check on them anymore.

How about you? Do you ever keep an eye on your competitors or check them out?

 

No, since it's a waste of my time.
Instead, you can be using that same time to better your own website,

 

Sure

I don't see it as a bad thing either. In fact, I do it here :p I run an admin forum that would most likely be seen as a direct competitor of THIS forum. I go to many admin forums to see what features they provide and what is hot and what is not. Its not a bad thing, its done every day in the business world. However, when comparing features, I attempt to duplicate some of them except to be unique about it and offer more. Many forums use features that go off the forum too like blogs, chat rooms, systems to compare things and so on... I tend to stay away from those features as there is a chance it could take away from the forum, so I localize them into the forum so that activity remains in the same place, to me that is being unique about it.

I also surf competing forums for thread ideas. Now before you start calling me a topic pirate, hear me out. Everyone does it or at least the majority of forum owners, especially for newly launched forums. Now, when I surf for topic ideas, I don't copy and paste, that to me is WRONG. Instead, I post new topics to my forum in my own words and I try to add more to the topic than the forum I found the topic on has. Is there really anything wrong with that at all? I don't see any reasons how it could be wrong

I was once a victim to copy and paste, the issue has been resolved and myself and the other party are friendlier to one and other now. However, I asked why they copied me and they pretty much said that my content was awesome and in a huge way, I felt honored haha. But I reminded them that is was still my hard work and that I didn't care that they looked at my forum for ideas but that they put them into their own words because then it is unique

We humans learn off one and other, we cannot sacrifice that ideology