I want to create awareness for my forum. Marketing is hard, I know. I am thinking do running a competition to get users to my site. The user who generates the most activity, preferably signup and comments via referrals. Can anyone advice on the best way to track the activities of the users?
I have seen initiatives like that in the past but they are often dogged with problems (fake sign ups, spam posts etc)
Instead, I would advise you give people a reason to join and/or participate in the forum - such as with giveaways or competitions.
We had one on one of my forums where every month for an entire year we gave away a Black & Decker Steam mop - I think it worked well. Members needed to log in at least once a week to get their weekly entry - but we threw in bonus entries several times a month too, which gave people a reason to log in every day.
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Thank you. How do I keep track of logins?
The forum we hosted this on was running vB but the competition itself (where we kept track of entries etc) was a Rails app - so I suggest creating a similar app.
If you can’t do that I suggest a simpler kind of giveaway or competition.
I’d be interested in something like this too. A giveaway that focuses on activity within the Discourse app, meaning that’s able to track such activities at least enough to give entries to said person.
That or a competition, but same issue, would need something that can track activities 
This topic has some ideas for how to turn certain types of activity into badges:
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Many thanks. I think I can use badges. I’ll just need to determine the
combination of badges to use to determine the winner.