I openly and strongly oppose any type of permabanning on any community , organization or structure . The worst you could give is a 2-5 year ban . People change dramatically over time and personally I like to think that time teaches and that I won't lose any potential talents because I permabanned them in a rush . IMHO the adepts of permabanning lack the resources to police their members . But then again I encourage all my competitors to permaban so since we're both into webhosting . Go for it permaban as much as you like man
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digitalpoint.com# Just cant help to notice reach going on a down trend. I know alexa is lol, maybe site analytics says something else. Hopefully only the spammers go away...
Well think about who uses Alexa... probably spammers for one... and users who think posting pointless crap will help their site with links are also the ones that think that somehow having the Alexa toolbar will help their site. Alexa toolbar users definitely tend to be users in the countries that are more inclined to be spammers. If you look at our traffic ranks by country (as stated by Alexa), the top countries are Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Philippines and Romania... which more or less exactly match up with the countries that we get the most spam/useless posts from. Now, based on REAL stats (Google Analytics), United States is where most users are from (and it's 3.5x more traffic than the second highest country, which is United Kingdom and 6x higher than the 3rd country (Canada). But again... people in the US, Canada and UK tend to not care about Alexa toolbar like countries that have the spammers for whatever reason. If you want to see how accurate Alexa "reach" is, just compare it historically to our ACTUAL traffic graph over here. Alexa is good to see RELATIVE traffic to sites in the same niche, but it's pretty useless for seeing any sort of real stats. If you look at similar sites, the "recent drop" happened for those sites too. Which makes me think Alexa tweaked their algorithms (which they do once in awhile).
Its really sad that people care so much about the do-follow link from DP like it will negatively affect their business online. On a side note, I don't believe that preventing is the main reason. I have no clue what's the real reason, but I doubt its this. -The total moderator count is extremely low (some of them are not exactly active either) -The P&R section is completely off the grid for moderation with the rare chance that a moderator who likes to argue happens to get annoyed and throw a random infraction to a random rule breaker in there(that's pretty spammy if you ask me) -The adsense section is loaded with "I MADE $400 TODAY" because members are not looking for the do-follow but the traffic from making that dumb topic. -In the buy & sell there is too many topics starting with potential which basically means that digitalpoint feels its not worth the effort to have a turn-key(sites that make less than $30 per month, etc section split from established sites). Problem with that is you get SPAM. -Topic creators are allowed to use ALL-CAPS IN THEIR TOPIC -Blackhat is allowed in DP. Blackhat is for scammers, liars, cheaters, spammers, criminals, and people that have suffered from bad parenting. The list goes on for things of Digitalpoint that make it all too friendly for spammers. Be honest, what's the real reason?
See first post in this thread. Somehow people seem to think just because we do one thing, it somehow has relevance to other things or issues, and that we aren't doing something about other issues as well... Which is not the case. No longer being "dofollow" has nothing to do with things like splitting forum categories or P&R.
Some of my points were not related specifically to preventing people spamming to raise their post count, but why not apply yourself and hit the whole row of spam. Another month and things could be better overall, not just for the tiny part of it. I don't think you are not doing anything about this, just throwing the whole picture on the table and wondering if you consider the other types of spam an issue as this pointless post count spam is just a mere sub-section of the issue with spam.
Of course other types of spam (and other non-spam related issues) are being worked on. There are changes almost daily to address things as needed... just the vast majority aren't seen, because most things are backend things. For example the system analyzes new users before they even make their first post and will simply remove their account before they even get to make their first post based on a high probability of that user being a spammer or someone who would only contribute low quality posts to the forum. About 300 new accounts per week are simply deleted before they even get a CHANCE to use it because of that. So yes... a lot of work is being done to address all sorts of issues, but most are not readily apparent. I couldn't even imagine how shitty this place would be if we weren't constantly developing new systems to proactively combat the crap. There's a TON of ideas I want to develop that I haven't had the time... but the reality is that there is only so much I can do, and I have to prioritize. And thankfully not everything I spend my time on is about combating spam/low quality posts... I probably would kill myself then. These sort of things are always being worked as well... http://tools.digitalpoint.com/ http://advertising.digitalpoint.com/ http://products.digitalpoint.com/ http://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/
I'm slightly surprised this wasn't already active here and it sort of explains all the spam posts. I'm not premium member but I think it's a good idea for the benefit for DP.
I say some of the forums should be closed off to certain countries were most of the spam originates. Harsh, but quality assurance for sure.
Many new members post just to reach the 25 posts total in order to post in BST area so I think you should do something about that too. Take a look at this thread. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2223113
For once, you say? I can't recall any previous engagements we've had Indy, I'll have to consult my past posts.
Do you think there are much more easy to implement ways to reduce spam. I mean yes cutting of countries like mine (India) will reduce spam but why take the facility out from all Indians when there are many other simple ways to. A huge forum like Dp works on 4 mods, rest of them have been offline for months and years. Getting new mods or at ;least making the existing ones work will help.
you have to keep in mind that most of the traffic comes from those "certain countries" , but people bring real quality with them. Spammers are just 1% of the total. Don't forget to append Three Zeros (000) with your site's traffic rank after banning people from India, Pakistan, Srilanka etc.
Good point Laxman, although a good idea may to have people from known spam countries be a rule to the exception. Maybe have something to test. Mightee, Shawn claimed the USA, UK and Canada bring the most traffic.
Ya, I agree the mods here need to be doing there job. Some do but a lot of them are never here and the ones that are can't do it all. I am for banning countries. I ban a few of them fro my site. I does suck to have to do that but when the majority of the traffic from a specific country is spam or scammers then yes I think it's a good idea. No offense but India is one of the worst and I block them from my sites. and China.
That's certainly not true! This is what i found!! CountryPercent of Site Traffic India 26.3% United States 18.8% United Kingdom 6.0% Pakistan 4.8%
I have just gone premium today because of this. And I wonder if the signature links on my posts that I made when I wasn't a premium member will stay nofollow now that I'm a premium member?