Competition entries.

I get what you mean. There are lots of low quality threads that are effortless. Sometimes, it's just a duplicate of an existing thread, but in different wording. I just giggle at them and read something else.

On the other hand, I love starting discussions, whatever they may be, and sometimes I get people rolling, but sometimes I don't. I do my best to provide quality content, but if there's no interest in a discussion, I can't force it.

I'm a bit split on this, because, yes, we might have low quality content, but we're still nudged to provide quality content, too. Any other forum has variety of content quality too. And quality is subjective...

P.S. Even though the rules say something like "Spam or low-effort content will not qualify!", that doesn't stop people from writing low-effort content, even if they won't qualify with it.

I agree, a new forum post once a month was a good amount if you wanted to participate. Hopefully they review and filter out the low effort forum posts before they announce winners (as they do with comments/replies) as some of the topics I've read recently since they changed the system have been pretty much copy and paste or just repetitive and not very well thought out.

A daily comment is fine and doesn't affect overall quality but a daily new discussion is too much in my opinion, and has caused there to be some noticeable poor effort topics.

That being said, the forum seemed dead before this push through the Gleam competition pages started and it was obvious something needed to be done to drive engagement up. Even with the once-monthly competition task to make a new discussion (rather than daily), half of the posts being written weren't interesting or seemed spammy and low-effort. That comes down to a lack of moderation and feedback when/after creating the posts. In that sense this kinda feels like Lenovo trying to put a low-effort bandage on the problem of their forum being underused and not having much of a community between their product users.

They really need to fix things like the email notifications not working. I turned on notifications for my discussions so that I would know if people replied to them - to continue the discussion or get an idea of what people liked to read. Yet in months I've had, I think, one sole email that someone replied to one of my many discussions. Despite there having been a lot of replies to multiple. If people don't know there is engagement in their discussions, they're not motivated to continue the chat and don't get any "reward" feeling for posting good stuff, because they have no idea if anyone actually likes their previous posts.

I have the same feeling on this. The quality of posts really has taken a downturn with many not even trying to at least try to comply with the rules. Even so, there still are posts that are worthy of a good discussion so to each his own I guess.

Yeah you put it well, someone can start a high quality post but doesn't mean people will discuss it, and if people provide whatever a low quality post is it can be made interesting in the replies

I think that asking for a daily top level thread is too much and does encourage people to make low effort posts. Low effort replies are less of an issue.

Ultimately I have my doubts whether this kind of thing works. Ultimately a forum needs to fill a certain niche and find an audience for that niche, but other than tech support stuff there is not much that is Lenovo-specific.

If you want to create a new forum, I would suggest creating it for a specific niche and then trying to draw the audience for that niche to your forum. You can also see on YouTube that the days of generic low quality content are over. You need to specialize to compete.

I agree entirely, there's the odd one or two new threads that are worth bothering replying to but some of them are blatantly just there for the competition entry. The same goes for certain posts and I have seen a fair few that look copied and pasted from game review sites or the author has simply reworded someone else's post.