I was a member of WMW for almost five years and after a post tonight questioning the wisdom of this action my account was deleted. Ok, Brett. If this is a joke, the joke is on you buddy. I'm gone forever and I'm sure others will be, too.
It is cold! Hell, Shawn hates probably 50% + of my posts, yet nary (sp) a delete or modification. Most forums I frequent follow that model, post and let post. I am sure as hell either Gworld or I have pissed Shawn off with our posts (both of us?), yet he allows both unfettered and allows the posts to either play out or burn out. To me, this is the ultimate in self control.
well the only person i've banned from my forum is one who stole my personal address. now they've followed me to DP and started spouting the same crap again and trying to get me banned
Brett might learn something from AltaVista and Excite, remember them? I do, but many others don't. I think he wants an all paying board of members and if that's what he desires, then that's great. Be honest and up front about it. All I said tonight in my post before being banned from the board is, that if you had five children and four are bankrupting you, that you wouldn't kick out all five. Also, I mentioned that his forum contained many employees from Google and Yahoo that were willing to post replies to webmasters about their questions and concerns. I said I don't think these companies are going to send representives around anymore if their search engines are banned from his forum. I guess that was too much, so I was banned from the form after four + years and over 800 posted messages. I agree with oilman, Brett has lost his mind. If this is some kind of game he's playing then the joke is going to be on him, eventually. I wonder what he was drinking out in Vegas last week?
Ah ha! In the SEO Chat thread, I told you all that this was part of Shawn's master plan to be the only webmaster forum on the web. Did you listen to me? Nope. [evil laugh]
The robots.txt file on WMW was dated last Friday when I checked it, so I believe something happened at the pubcon that made Brett mad at the major search engines, so he decided that he would just ban them when he got home. If this is true, he will learn quickly that he needs them more than they need him. Just watch the PR 7 go to PR 0 in the next few weeks and he will find out first hand how much he needed them. I'd love to hear the story behind the story on this one!
You don't have to wait... it's already been completely removed from the Google index (including PageRank). Still strikes me as odd... I'm kind of interested to see how it plays out down the road when the "experiment" is over. Based solely on what I know about traffic from this forum, my wild stab in the dark is that WMW should probably be getting 500,000-1,000,000 visitors from Google searches every month. That's an awful lot of traffic to be missing out on. And it's not just "information leechers"... for this forum, roughly 50% of the new users are from people doing a search in Google for something.
i think google's stratergy is very anfair ...!!! google should change its policy to ban anywebsite . and google must explain before ban anywebsite ......... what do u think ???? --xman
If Google explains/warns people about banning it would just make people braver to get closer to the "edge" as far as spamming. "Oh... Google didn't like that... thank god they told me." hehe
From what I've always been able to tell, Brett who lives in Austin about 80 miles south of me in Waco, has never been one to play games. I always saw him as a straight arrow and he always expected anyone on his board to follow the rules. It's almost like the whole forum has been turned over to China where decent is no longer allowed. Maybe someone here that was at Pubcon might explain what's really going on. It does appear that he's trying to teach the search engines a lesson and he doesn't have the power or the pockets to pull this thing off.
That's nothing!! One post from a wacko will drive any intelligent human insane!!! Yet there are...3,870, no 3,871, no 3,872, no... wacko posts and they havn't been deleted and I havn't been banned....yet. er then again, back when I imped GoogleGuy.... *Must try harder to be a wacko.*