# Creating awareness about a forum
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [6월 23, 2015, 12:57오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371 "2015-06-23T12:57:28Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@streetlife](https://meta.discourse.org/u/streetlife)
#### Post date: [6월 23, 2015, 12:57오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371/1 "2015-06-23T12:57:28Z")
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?
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### Author:  [@AstonJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/AstonJ)
#### Post date: [6월 23, 2015, 1:05오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371/2 "2015-06-23T13:05:09Z")
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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### Author:  [@streetlife](https://meta.discourse.org/u/streetlife)
#### Post date: [6월 23, 2015, 1:12오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371/3 "2015-06-23T13:12:17Z")
Thank you. How do I keep track of logins?
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### Author:  [@AstonJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/AstonJ)
#### Post date: [6월 23, 2015, 1:23오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371/4 "2015-06-23T13:23:01Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@mbs](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mbs)
#### Post date: [6월 23, 2015, 1:24오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371/5 "2015-06-23T13:24:54Z")
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 😃
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### Author:  [@mcwumbly](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mcwumbly)
#### Post date: [6월 23, 2015, 1:36오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371/6 "2015-06-23T13:36:56Z")
This topic has some ideas for how to turn certain types of activity into badges:
> [@\[Superseded\] What cool badge queries have you come up with?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-cool-badge-queries-have-you-come-up-with/18978):
>
> warning Enabling Badge SQL entails security and performance risks so it is not available by default. For more information, see: [Enable Badge SQL](https://meta.discourse.org/t/badge-sql-can-no-longer-be-edited-by-default/47894) This topic became too long to be easily searched and has been broken down into separate topics. If you have any questions about how to write a badge query, or have one to share, please start a new topic in the #data & reporting category and tag it with the #sql-triggered-badge tag. +1 More ideas: [Some common badge queries](https://meta.discourse.org/t/some-common-badge-queries-idea/31859)
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### Author:  [@streetlife](https://meta.discourse.org/u/streetlife)
#### Post date: [6월 23, 2015, 2:04오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/creating-awareness-about-a-forum/30371/7 "2015-06-23T14:04:18Z")
Many thanks. I think I can use badges. I’ll just need to determine the
combination of badges to use to determine the winner.