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I needed recently to find something on warrior forum, I figured out they are overwhelmed with spammers...
As my friend said they have 50 times more members then a real internet marketeers and webmasters...
I think this is the right moment to introduce some changes to our forums
in aim to get rid of the spammers and become a premium webmaster forum!
Now going to ban some people :angel:.
"ban spammers, limit plenty thingz on the forum, GoPro with everything"... Doesn't sounds like community right?
It is hard to get a user but very easy to lose. Limit something should be very mature decision.
New layout and few new good Mods (considering the time and number of existing ones) would make this forum much better.
IMO, it's all about balance. You cant build a forum with a ban button, but by the same token you can make one useless by never using it, and the members worth having wont want to wade thru a million lookalike "me too" posts created by a handful of guys with a few handfuls of logins.
A minimum post requirement to get a sig discourages people that only want a sig and build a ton of profiles that post a time or two and add nothing. When someone makes a fast run of fluff posts to reach a sig limit of 30 or so it sticks out... and you remove them. You end up with slower growth but better quality... thereby a stronger forum. :02
I dont think that limiting number of posts to benefit sig can do the job. Everyone would start to make lame massages to get the number.
IMHO, it's better to limit the number of links in signature, how it looks like, to exclude colors from sig, to ban malicious sites, to completely forbid bad links.
In this case, like it looks now, I am wandering, do I want my link mixed with some spammy sites on the same page!?
I thought the same thing, but we tested it in another forum recently and we were deluged with spam profiles doing no more than a couple of posts with each one.Quote:
I dont think that limiting number of posts to benefit sig can do the job. Everyone would start to make lame massages to get the number.
In less than a year we went back to requiring a minimum post count for a sig and just dealing with the speed posters cause it was less of a problem than policing that many sigs, many of which contained content the owners were not in the least having show up beside their forum name in a search engine.
The guys that were willing to make a profile and maybe one or two posts with 50 different names were NOT prepared to take the time to write 30+ posts that'd pass the smell test for each of that many IDs.
From a maintenance standpoint it's easier to fix one speed poster doing 30 posts than 30 spam IDs doing 1 or two each. When you scale those numbers up... the numbers become unreasonably daunting when you dont have a sig limit.
Given that mods are volunteers, you have to consider the time factor or you wont be able to keep good ones, you'll be stuck with the ones that want the role for a power trip.
I have different experience on another forum with (at this very moment) 447878 members. We have just one limit and few rules: 2 literal (non anchored) links in sig and can't send PM until 5 posts. Now we have one more registered - 447879 :D
Discouraging spammers, and giving value to non spammers... ( just a thought)
~Mike
Nobody told me there was gonna be math on the test. One I'm talking about's in the 144k+ range. Pretty much a shoot the dogs / feed the tigers mentality there, which mirrors what Mike30 said.
Real members are given every courtesy, but spammers and scammers get the door prize in rapid order. Quality over quantity is the stated goal, so members don't have to wade thru a hundred me too posts to get to the one guys that knows his stuff and isnt just posting for a sig.
It is fun though to every day go through all the crap posts (I like this, Wow great article, and so forth) and delete them.
But even more fun?
To just ban and have all those posts deleted at once.
Regardless of the rules, spammers will work around them.
So many good arguments, but also many arguments that prove the opposite. I'm wondering what the best solution would be. I don't have experience with forum members, but after reading all posts, I think we could just wait and keep going like we're doing.
Eventually in a later stage we can change the rules about this. Good to have had a discussion about it though ;)