So which direction is this forum heading in?

On the one hand, happygeek seems to think it's all about the quality. But when it comes to doing something about it, the enthusiasm seems to be more muted

On the other hand, all Dani seems to care about is post and be damned, like the 1-line copy/paste pith of a drive-by sig-spammer is somehow equal to the carefully thought out analysis and response of the regulars in say the C/C++ forums and the virus fixing forum.

I'm sure "909,753 Members" plays very well when setting rates for advertisers.

But somehow the reality is a little different.
Points Earned Today from Activities Worth 1 Point Each
Logging In: 338
That's easy - 338 people have logged in today (it's 4pm here and now, so I guess it's about midday in New York)
That's not many out of the total membership. Probably half of them will be the drive-by's, or short-stay members.

Points Earned Today from Activities Worth 3 Points Each
Replying to Threads: 1,524
So 508 replies so far....
I wonder how much less it would be if posting games and internet scammers were eliminated? Here's an idea, if the management doesn't want to delete those sub-forums, just try "closed for maintenance" for a week or two, just to see what happens.

Points Earned Today from Activities Worth 5 Points Each
Starting Threads: 660
And 132 new threads (133 if you count this one).

And now a quick look at post count ranks:
Total Posts: 1 Member Rank by Post Count: #83,661
Total Posts: 2 Member Rank by Post Count: #56,610
Total Posts: 3 Member Rank by Post Count: #42,554
Total Posts: 4 Member Rank by Post Count: #34,017
Total Posts: 5 Member Rank by Post Count: #28,316
Total Posts: 10 Member Rank by Post Count: #15,394
90% of the members never bother to post, so if the "problem" was simply down to the number of posts (good or bad), then getting even a small number of the silent majority to say something would be a big plus.

It only takes 17 posts to get into the top 1% of posters on the forum. Most drive-by spammers are valued members by that metric.

Consider sending each 0-poster an email asking why they didn't post, 1 week after signing up, asking why they didn't post. You might have to bait it with say "free entry into a draw for $ amazon voucher" or something.

The number of members joining per day falling off a cliff wouldn't matter so much if most of them actually engaged in some way.

Who knows, maybe they just like to read sig-link spam ;)

Recommended Answers

All 10 Replies

On the one hand, happygeek seems to think it's all about the quality.

That's the ideal, yes. I'm open to ideas for making people post quality content.

But when it comes to doing something about it, the enthusiasm seems to be more muted

The problem is maintaining quality without being so restrictive as to drive people away, and without requiring a huge staff to constantly police the forums. Signature spammers are the worst problem right now, and there are currently discussions going on about how to improve matters with an automated system.

On the other hand, all Dani seems to care about is post and be damned

Dani is concerned with growing the business, so I can understand her rationale. We still need to convince her that a thriving community of spammers and noobs doesn't make for good business. ;)

Edit:

That's easy - 338 people have logged in today

Not so easy, actually. If you choose the option of remaining logged in, you won't get an activity point for logging in by leaving and returning, as far as I can tell. So while 338 people have logged in explicitly, the number of people who have participated in the forums today could be far greater.

We still need to convince her that a thriving community of spammers and noobs doesn't make for good business.

This is the solution to all the problems we're having with the sigspam, internet marketing forum and the panda update.

Member Avatar for diafol

I've semi-retired from this site. The 'pollution' is one of the main reasons - the site has lost its appeal. The waste-of-time posts are not so annoying anymore, just boring.

If DW doesn't get a grip on this, quality will plummet, but member numbers will soar. Siggers will flock like flies around...

I think that we're definitely being affected by the Google Panda algorithm from both ends. On one side, our traffic has been directly affected, and as a result there are less new people finding us, less new content being posted, etc. On the other end, a lot of sites out there have been affected by Panda, and the biggest push that the SEO community as a whole is encouraging right now is to post on forums to increase your backlinks and recover your site. Even official Google representatives are encouraging this to some extent, not to mention just about every SEO firm out there.

The problem is that 99% of "SEO spammers" are people who would really make excellent contributing members of our community. They're just trying to grow their businesses and are being fed bad advice as to how to go about that by an entire industry of supposedly trustworthy people who call themselves experts.

The reason I don't want to just say "Go away, you're banned" is because back when I first started DaniWeb, I myself was given the exact same bad advice, and unintentionally spammed a whole bunch of other forums just because I didn't know any better. That's why I am so big on the idea of training them and welcoming them to participate for real instead of just kicking them to the curb.

Not so easy, actually. If you choose the option of remaining logged in, you won't get an activity point for logging in by leaving and returning, as far as I can tell. So while 338 people have logged in explicitly, the number of people who have participated in the forums today could be far greater.

Correct. There are about 500 people who visit the site while automatically logged in, for every 300 who explicitly log in. Far far fewer than there used to be, unfortunately.

I've semi-retired from this site. The 'pollution' is one of the main reasons - the site has lost its appeal. The waste-of-time posts are not so annoying anymore, just boring.

If DW doesn't get a grip on this, quality will plummet, but member numbers will soar. Siggers will flock like flies around...

Aww :( Are there other forums that you like better nowadays? From what I understand from talking to fellow forum-owners, the problem seems to be rampant across us all.

Member Avatar for diafol

No offence Dani, I'm just tired of the whole genre. Even my own forums are suffering from the odd idiot, but as they're in a minority language / small member base, I don't see the problem on the same scale. Scale my sites up and I suppose I'd see the same sort of nonsense. I have no real answer other than ban the perps (temporarily) - let them know what they're doing is naughty - let them repent and see the light - if that's what you truly want. If you take no action, they'll keep on doing it and drag DW further into the gloom. I really used to enjoy DW as there seemed to be no underclass of fools around to mess up the threads.

As I mentioned earlier, the 'pollution' is only 'one of' the main reasons, I'm fading away. The others are just general stuff.

You mean like the latest fuck-tart angelina88 with the SMS spam all over the forum?

Here's an idea Dani (and no, not EVERY forum has such a problem as this one seems to have). But then again, not every forum has an internet marketing(scam) forum which is the big honey pot for those kinds of twits.

Here, visit this -> http://www.stopforumspam.com/
Better yet
- sign up
- install whatever plugin is necessary to STOP people joining who have been black-listed already
- install whatever plugin is necessary so that when someone is banned for spamming, they get blacklisted in a whole load of other places as well.

> 99% of "SEO spammers" are people who would really make excellent contributing members of our community

I would say closer to 5% at best. The other 95% are blathering idiots that only sign up to parrot useless "advice" they copied from a poster above or some article farm content in an effort to spread their signatures around.

If they actually want to learn and have productive discussions about SEO and internet marketing then they should be willing to do it without any signatures. Turn off signatures completely for a month and see what happens. Just consider it an experiment.

commented: No signatures is a good idea. +0
commented: I agree. 99%? Get real! +0
commented: Sigs suck anyway - pointless nonsense - put crud in your profile if you want to - no need for sigs :) +0

Ezzaral, I'll give you 50% ;)

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