yes you've contributed a lot, with posts like "Thanks Frank. Those words motivate me" and "Thanks for the kind words. If you need help ask here." had i been a mod, you would have got 2 infractions for that @Rob Any plans to make V7n "nofollow"?
No surprise. Most of the people are mods puppets just like you. Whatever new thing shawn adds you are going to agree on that and are going to stay on their side. You skipped the longest thread of DP ( maybe ) to get some flaws to prove me wrong. Just to inform you no one in the thread said anything except great thraed etc, so you dont expect me to qoute their posts and say anything else than that.
If you think nofollowing links is the only thing we do to try and combat spam, you are very mistaken. It's only one small thing of many. Did you read the first post in this thread? lol Agreed... it's definitely not going to change much overnight. It's more of a long-term thing. Let's pretend for a moment you do remember it.... you would remember the servers weren't even for this forum primarily, they were for the free tools: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=4718 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=63695 Now, while we are in la-la land, I'm curious how you so vividly remember it when the last time it happened was 18 months before you registered? Fairly certain that would make the problem *worse*, not better... people spamming useless posts in a race to get 4,000.
Here is the page I seen http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/donate.html and it is still live so maybe it was started 18 months before I registered but It was after I had been a member here for a year by the time I seen it... So no need to "pretend". "Someone dugg this article in the forums, it made it to digg.com's front page and within about 10 minutes the flood of digg users pushed the already overworked servers over the edge and seized up MySQL's 1,000 concurrent connections (not an easy feat). So that digg was the final straw for me, and now its time for new hardware." and this "Of course, it doesn't make good business sense to drop nearly $100k on new servers that are solely for tools and forum that are completely free." Sounds to me like it was for the site according to this. But it don't really matter anyway. It's your site you will do as you wish. I just don't like the idea of nofollow sigs but If I want to use YOUR site I have to get over it. right? and no, I don't think this is the only thing you do to "combat spam".
It *ended* 18 months before you registered, but it's beside the point really... and really had nothing to do with the forum. It was about running the free tools. And we are talking about something that happened more than half a decade ago, which has nothing to do with nofollow/dofollow links in the forum.
Didn't know that. Just remembered seeing it. Didn't know that either but as I stated in my above message. (which I was editting my post and adding it in while you replied) None of it matters.
Clearly... If you think of other ways to allow dofollow links that a spammer would never be able to do, let me know. The premium membership thing is nothing more than a barrier that spammers aren't going to get through. It has nothing to do with me believing non-premium members are spammers. Some are, some aren't... but I don't think spammers are going to buy premium membership. If they *do* start buying premium membership, we will take further action because obviously that barrier doesn't work any longer.
Suggestions: 1. Place a character-count check on posts, like a post must contains 200 characters if you are a newbie (account less then 1 year) 2. You can allow dofollow sigs to members with reputation points greater than 300 for example. Spammers won't be able to get that higher rep points, i'm damn sure!
When my magazine opens up I will have a premium account here there are great benefits to it. One benefit that would be nice is allowed to make duplicate threads. LOL.
I'm not opposed to "dofollow" links... but there is a certain point where the amount of effort trying to allow them just outweighs it all (effort being trying to control the spam/useless posts that it indirectly causes). The effort involved with trying to pre-moderate every post, every signature link, etc. (and then going back and revalidating every link on a continuous basis in case the content of the page being linked to changed or is redirecting) is just too great, and not a realistic way to spend time. What would be amazingly nice is if Google offered a "Quality API", where you submit a URL, and Google returns a quality score... something like that would be terribly useful and would go a long way in trying to programmatically determine the quality of a page. In the meantime, I'd rather spend time developing new features for users vs. reviewing millions and millions of links and posts for quality.
But the free tools is what made this forum popular, and the forum was making money back then. This isn't just about nofollow, its about everything leading up to it and the direction you are heading with this forum.
Still don't see the connection... yes, the tools made the forum popular. We did take donations for those tools back in the day. Yes, the forum was making money back then (although not enough to buy servers). Just don't see the connection between nofollow links and donations for servers a long time ago. The direction we are headed with the forum is (hopefully) less spam and less useless posts.
If you were a free forum, do what the hell you want, we would have nothing to complain about (even then I think it would be silly not to listen to users). But as soon as you start asking for donations (don't pretend the tools are separate to this forum, its what made this forum and without them you wouldn't have had the success you've had) and paid membership then it changes the dynamics of the forum. As soon as you start treating this like a business, you should have the member's best interests in mind, and deciding to go nofollow clearly goes against that. Surely, the admin of a webmaster forum would know that more then anyone else.
Less spam, less pointless posts *are* in the user's best interest. nofollow might not be in the best interest of an individual user, but I'm not interested in the global good.
Yes, but users/contributors are mutually exclusive, and dealing with spam goes with the territory of being a popular forum.
I have better idea - make premium membership compulsorily. No dealing with "useless spam" and forum will be full of "quality threads". According to Euler's formula (after adding / subtracting) in trigonometry = Premium Membership (cos x) + dofollow links (i sin x) = Less spam, less pointless posts (eix). You can later solve this problem yourself using f(x) as constant function in (x) and the result will be 1.