How to raise the general level of literacy/intelligence on a forum?

Is there any good way to encourage long, well thought-out posts from intelligent users and discourage semi-literate stupid comments without being unfriendly or harsh? I've got the Thanks system in place, but that seems to be more of a popularity meter than a way to encourage good posts. I've heard the NoSpam question can be used to good effect by weeding out those incapable of answering it with the correct spelling, but it doesn't seem to keep them out for long. I considered adding Spellcheck but am worried about it taking up too much of the server's resources.

 

What's the age group of your users? Is English their first language?

 

When it comes to improper use of grammar and the mis-spelling of words, I will go absolutely crazy. I, too, am interested in knowing a) the age of your target demographic and b) the language(s) they speak.

 

Spellcheck is not particularly server intensive. Keep in mind it's only checking on post.

As for raising a forum's general intellect... well, you need to attract intellectual people and get them to post something valuable. It helps if you carefully prune and dissect less than brilliant members so that your smarter members can spend more time on more interesting problems.

 

Spellcheck shouldn't be a concern because most modern browsers have one built in now.

In addition to the other two questions already mentioned, where are you getting the majority of your members from? Another forum? Social networking?

 

I'd say the average age of my members is late 30s to 40s. I get them mostly from Google and real-life word of mouth. The members causing the problem are usually younger, though some are 30-40 or older and computer illiterate. I and the other members do occasionally ask them to mind their spelling, but it doesn't work for very long. (And actually, at least one such member really does have a mild mental disability.) I'm not willing to get rid of them or ban them entirely, it would make everyone think I was too hard on them.

 

And I suppose that it would be a bit far-fetched to include a clause within the Terms of Service agreement regarding improper grammatical use.

 

This is a tough situation. I think the best solution is to try and bring in some more intellectual and intelligent users to have a majority population of smarter users.

 

This is a bit of a nightmarish situation for one of my forums, so I've had to implement some creative solutions.

What you describe is really a specific case of a more general problem: One forum community with multiple distinct member groups.

I implemented a number of private sub-forums to give each group their own private space. Each of these sub-forums has they own group leaders who control membership in the groups. People who don't join the private forums are never bothered by the messages in the private forums. One of the private sub-forums is only for general chat -- and it has sub-forums of it's own!

I also implemented the Opt-Out Forums from Get New Posts mod, so that people who are not interested in certain topic (like general chat) can block those threads from showing up in their New Posts scan.

In addition, I pay a limited number of writers to create quality forum threads. These aren't the usual ten-cent paid posters. These are writers with some industry knowledge who charge me an average of 2c/w to write quality articles and post them to the forum.

 

That wouldn't go over well, I think! New registrations would plummet...

I'll reconsider the spellcheck idea; I'd heard it slowed things down, but maybe it has improved since then. Unfortunately the culprits really don't care if their posts are misspelled.

 

Ban the stupid people.

Most of the time, people like that are trolling. So your not really banning someone that is "stupid", your probably banning a troll.

 

I am not willing to do that. One or two of these people have genuine disabilities, and I'll be damned if I kick them out for it when they otherwise follow the rules and are some of the forum's biggest supporters.

 

I think producing articles on your site's genre could be helpful, this way, users who are just acquiring the interest in the genre could get a grasp.

And, like Will.Spencer is doing, hire writers. Writers who actually have an interest in, say, Ice cream, Science, Disabilities and Fashion.