I have seen a few forums doing this now and I know at least 75% of their content and activity is coming from postloop, It really isn't any of my business I know, but I like to keep my ear to the ground and watch how things work out for people. I am interested to know how this would actually work out in the long run, as the community would just be based on cash and once that is gone so is the community. The only real benefit I can see to this is if you were building the forum up to sell it in the future, I recently saw someone do this and make a very healthy profit from it. Getting to the questions I wanted to ask, Have you used postloop to start your community off? How did it work out for you in the long run? Did you eventually remove your forum from the program and what effect did it have on the activity of the community? (truthfully) I know some people can get addicted to having a very active forum and stray from the fact that they don't have a community, just postloopers - Then they continue to spend all of their money in the program even though they may have said to themselves they would remove their forum at x posts or whatever.
I used Post Loop for while, and I have to say ( maybe because of my niche), I found it to be of little or no use to me. Part one of it is finding forums/blogs/sites that I am interested enough in the subject to post knowledgeably, I consider my self to have a very broad education and feel I can comment on most things, I found it difficult to find enough to build up points. Part two is relying on other admin to post quality pieces on your forum, maybe because of the niche, mine was not a popular forum to post to. So for me the experience didn't work. I soon realised I would be better off concentrating and putting my posting effort into my own forum.
A community is a group of 'happy' members who finds your site interesting and are active (by active I mean, posting, communicating with others)... a postloop is the exact opposite: someone posts on your forum and in return, you'll be posting in his/her forum... and you have to agree, there's no 'community' feeling... I have never used PostLoop and wont use it
I feel the same way about post exchanges, after all that is all Postloop is in reality,a glorified form of post exchanges, yes they can sort of boost content, but do they actually provide quality, I would hazard a guess most don't.
It can't be a foundation of the community. Paid posters from postloop could only temporarily, and you nicely said - they go away when there's no cash involved
I don't know if it's fine to have a whole forum based on postloop members but I think that if you lack activity, you just may request help from postloop posters.
