Is this a new policy? I noticed that my signature only show up when I'm logged in. I see this with other people's signatures as well. Anyone else notice this?
So, I assume only the premium members can have their sigs shown to the public... That sucks... so people who have contributed to this forum years ago don't get a free sig. DP has gone downhill for the past 3-4 years.
So because of the spammers, you're going to penalize all the old schoolers who have contributed to the success of this forum?? Many of the old school DPers deserve credit for their contributions, without having to pay. Don't forget the people that made this forum what it is. Here's an idea: How about allowing dofollow signature links to show for members who have been with DP for over 2 years or members with over 500 posts?? That'll filter out 99% of the pass-by spammers. By allowing spammers to pay their way in, in my opinion, doesn't solve the problem.
Not to take anything away from our users, but if you want to get technical, the site was around for 9 years before there was a forum. The forum was opened because we needed a support venue for our already existing users. For example: http://tools.digitalpoint.com/tracker.php 100,000 users use it, and it's been around longer than the forum. No one is expected to pay for anything. Paying for the *possibility* to get a few useless dofollow links (which are not guaranteed for premium members) would just be silly. If the only value premium membership gives someone is a couple useless dofollow links, their money is better spent on other things (like hotdogs). Putting post restrictions on it would just proliferate the problem with people racing to get to 500 posts with useless/mindless posts. The entire purpose of the change is to improve post/user quality in the long term, not create a race of useless posts so people can hit some artificial threshold so they can start getting mostly useless dofollow links.
I'm aware DP existed before the forum, however, you can't downplay the significance of this forum. I'm guessing its your biggest money-maker. I'm not so much worried about spammers paying their way in - I'm more concerned about how the original DP forum members are getting their privilege taken away from them. For older members with thousands of posts, it would be more than just "a few useless dofollow links". Ok, you have a point there. How about the 2 years idea? I don't think a spammer would wait 2 years just to post some spammy links here. In any case, my point is: don't forget the people that got this forum to where it is today and give credit where credit is due. Thanks!
The difference between a few useless dofollow links and 1,000 useless dofollow links isn't that big to be honest. Most thread pages have very little value (most are PR0)... divide that value by another 400-500 (for all the other internal/external links on the page) and the value of the link gets very close to zero. And correct, sometimes things are taken away (like when we went from allowing 4 sig links to only allowing 2) and sometimes things are added/given. We are more interested in the bigger picture as a whole more than anything. Believe it or not, we don't make such changes to annoy people, we do it because it's one (small) thing out of hundreds of other things we do to make the site better in the long term. You would be amazed at how adamant spammers can be. We have people trying to buy old established accounts already. I mean just look at these Google results: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=buy+digital+point+account We have people who will create 100 accounts, post useless crap on all of them and sit on the accounts hoping that down the road some of them will slip through. Those same people would also be more than happy to phish/buy old accounts or even create accounts with long-term plans (2+ years) for them. If spammers weren't so persistent it wouldn't even be an issue, but unfortunately that's just how it is these days vs. the days when the forum first opened.
@ Shawn, Thanks for addressing my concerns. All of your points make sense. You obviously have more experience with fighting spam than I do. Just wondering - has the spamming gone down as a result of this? I really don't understand spammers... for all the work they put into spamming, they could just as easily put that effort and time into doing something positive.
Well, it's more of a long-term thing more than anything so it's tough to measure it over a short time period. But we HAVE started to see some measurable changes for the better. But it's also not the only thing we do to combat spam. But *overall* we are seeing slightly less mindless/pointless posts and maybe 10% less spammers. We are also seeing higher new user growth in countries that are less prone to spam (more users from US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc. and new users with high spam concentrations like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, etc. not growing as much as before). We have also seeing more old users using their accounts again than normal. The nofollow stuff is just one thing (of many) that is aiming to improve quality over the long term. But to answer your question... yes... I do believe it's (slowly) working. Agreed... it's not only annoying, it's a lot of work for something short term. The same amount of work and you could build something a little longer term. Makes no sense to me... more work for less reward.