Quality vs Quantity

Both are important for a great forum, but what would you rather have?

1. A smaller forum with a lot of high quality content and somewhat intelligent members posting interesting discussions. So less spam, but it wouldn't exactly make you rich.

2. An absolutely massive forum with no quality control and spammers posting sort of freely, like a lot of big SEO and webmaster forums nowadays. Might make you some more money though.

Which would you rather have?

 

I would rather somewhere in between.

While I really, really want to say that quality is most important, I know full well that if someone enters a small forum and only sees a handful of posts, then they're usually going to turn right back around. They're not even going to see that they're high quality. They're going to see the numbers (or lack thereof) and leave.

So while I don't want super low quality posts at all, I don't expect them to all be really high quality either.

 

I can see the importance of "quantity". Without a decent amount of topics and posts to support those topics, there would be no discussions going. Without discussions the forum is plain, empty, and of no interest to the general public. That, of course, is of no use to the general public at all. HOWEVER (and I say this in capitals just to emphasise), quality is of more importance in a way. After all, which would you rather have: An empty forum which you can build on? Or a forum jam-packed with thousands of posts that contain absolutely nothing of interest, poor grammar, maybe even spam links to other websites? An empty forum can be built upon. A spammy forum has to be cleaned up and then re-built. If you think about it, you're creating extra work for yourself plus having to deal with the consequences of storing a load of rubbish on your forum. No one likes a rubbish forum!

 

I'd take the small forum with awesome threads, and I think Google would too.

The problem with big forums is that the same subject gets repeated over and over and each new url becomes competition for others on keyword searches. That doesn't help your rankings at all.