It's been years since I've been a regular user here and since then I've seen some changes (not for the better). The amount of people who are hiring for American pricing has drastically gone down. I used to be able to find people who were able to pay $1.50/100 words for quality content without a problem but now days everyone's looking to outsource to American's for $.50/100 words. What in the world... The mods seem to be extremely trigger happy with the ban button. My friend informed he was banned for asking a question in the lounge. He simply asked how many different titles there were and that he noticed the titles were based on World Of Warcraft titles. He was also banned again when he reported someone for trolling random posts and nothing was done to the person who was trolling. The mods don't PM you or even tell you why you get banned. They hand out infractions like it's candy on Halloween. I also noticed the E-books section has been put into a sub-forum and the traffic is nearly dead on that. What in the world happened DP? This used to be the best place to go when you needed work, some extra cash or to sell anything. Anyone have any theories? DP Could desperately use some new mods. I'm sure I'll probably even get banned for this post as well.. I don't know if they hate Native English speakers or they just get bored and ban random people.
Your friend was either mistaken or lying. No one was banned for asking a question (about anything). As far as being banned for reporting someone... also something that's never happened. You should ask him to see the email he got for whatever the infraction was (the system will always send you an email for any infraction received, and that will have details about what it's for). You get an email for any infraction you receive. Yep, that was intentional. I've yet to run across an eBook worth reading (much less paying for). Not all, but most just tend to be idiotic get rich quick books from people who aren't rich. No one has been banned randomly. You were not banned (or even infracted for this post), rather you were banned because this is not your only account and we do not allow duplicate accounts.
I've noticed a shift after about a 1 year hiatus as well -- The general quality of posting is through the floor, and a lot of the mainstay users seem to have abandoned ship. I think a lot of the blame for that is how CRIPPLED the site is by default -- much of that can be blamed on the upgrade to the latest version of vBull which in itself is a fat bloated train wreck I can't believe they have the cojones to charge money for, much less that anyone is dumb enough to want to pay money for... But more than that the pointless forced password changes, endless adds, popups, and annoying stupid extra crap I think drove most of the good users away. I know it did with me -- to the point just to get to a PM someone sent me asking about what happened on another site (the ONLY thing that brought me back), I ended up making my own user.css, my own user.js, and manually adding a bunch of things to my block list just to make the site actually functional for me. user.css (built for Opera) adjusts page for people using different DPI and kills some of the crap * { font-size:100% !important; line-height:140% !important; } body { min-width:752px !important; max-width:76em !important; width:95% !important; margin:0 auto !important; font:normal 100%/140% arial,helvetica,sans-serif !important; } #vB_Editor_QR_editor, #vB_Editor_001_editor, textarea { height:28em !important; box-shadow:0 !important; // CSS 3 effect is slow/painful on my netbook } #navbar, #navbar * { font-size:16px !important; line-height:24px !important; } .inlinead { text-decoration:none !important; color:#000 !important; font-weight:inherit !important; box-shadow:0 !important; pointer-events:none !important; cursor:default !important; } .below_nav { display:none !important; } #pagetitle { padding-top:1em !important; } Code (markup): user.js (greasemonkey, Opera) Kills the stupid **** annoying mouse-over keywords idiocy. document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded',function() { var targetList=document.getElementsByClassName('inlinead'); for (t in targetList) { targetList[t].href=''; targetList[t].onclick=function() {return false;}; targetList[t].style.textDecoration='none'; targetList[t].style.boxShadow='0 0 0'; targetList[t].style.color='#000'; } },null); Code (markup): Block list (Opera's block-content, there are plugins for other browsers to do same) Kills annoying adverts, annoying pointless bandwidth wasting scripts, and other bits and pieces. http://yui.yahooapis.com/* http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/* http://s.dpstatic.com/s/vbulletin* http://ajax.googleapis.com/* http://s.dpstatic.com/s/ckeditor/* https://connect.facebook.net/* Code (markup): Altogether that basically kills around 60% the annoying bloated crap that makes this site effectively useless to legitimate users... the other 40% is unfortunately the idiotic non-semantic BS markup and even more pointless scripting hardcoded into the vBulletin theme. Though a HUGE suggestion, you should probably add some form of automated block to get rid of the ten-post wonder-whores. You know, the people who join on twenty different accounts and for a bunch of one line 5 word "gee that's great" posts JUST so they can get to the point they can spam links? You REALLY should take a good hard look at: http://www.stopforumspam.com/ Though to be frank, whenever I hear about people getting banned from Digital Point my brain goes "Gehugafugah?!?!?" -- given that in my experience this is one of the most permissive forums out there. As a rule it seems I can speak my mind without even getting a warning; when I'm persona-non-gratis on many other sites which seem to be inhabited by limp wristed thin skinned wussies who would rather stick their heads in the sand than face harsh reality.
Excellent post deathshadow, you're always completely on point. Great work with those custom workarounds, I use an ad blocker so I didn't realise how bad it was.
Yeah the forum changed a lot, like you said, it was pretty easy to find work a year ago but now i hardly get any leads anymore. When i do make a post in the content creation forum it gets lost in a sea of other threads of people offering their writing for like 1/4 of what i charge. The best thing people can do i just move on - unless someone makes some serious changes to this forum people will continue to spam it.
How about everyone being a part of the solution in regard to spam and duplicate threads? Turn the spammers in. We will work the reports as fast as we possibly can.
Which I do... but it's not enough -- I've seen it on forums before, they're flooding the gates faster than you could possibly be dealing with them... I mean, what am I gonna do, go in and report the first 20 posts in the HTML section? I reported two last night -- that were responsible for 20 posts apiece. It might be time to drag out the shotgun and make it so the mods can devote their time to regular rules enforcement -- hence my suggesting automating it using things like stopforumspam.org -- over a two year period on a rather high traffic website I ran for a decade (stepped down in december), I had TWO false positives -- and I think one spammer get past it -- on a forum that was seeing 80+ spammers a day... It also cut down on the database sizes speeding up the entire site, since it killed off several thousand users and was blocking hundreds of joins a day. I mean seriously, of the "alleged" 500K+ members here, how many are legitimate? I very much doubt it's more than 4K of them... but that's like the "2,300+ online right now" bit, where that's a complete lie fabricated by the measurement time being set too high -- making the "who's online" part of the forum index take longer to load, and reducing it's usefulness! Nothing like going "hey" to someone this site lists as online, and finding out they've been off the computer for over an hour. (5 minutes, guys, not an hour+!!!) You drop the measurement for users online to five minutes, and toss in a good spammer block like stopforumspam, and I'd be SHOCKED to see it report more than 150 people online "right now". In other words, the legitimate users.
Believe it or not we actually do block about 75 new registrations a day before they can even make their first post. There are more things in the works, but we have a *lot* of backend code blocking more than you would believe. I'd say it's relatively close to accurate as far as "legit" users... we flat out delete ones we find that are not (which at this point is more than 100,000 users that have been deleted. It's why there are 572k users, but the newest user ID is 688522 (we didn't skip any numbers). As far as whoever told you our sessions are set to an hour, they are very mistaken... it's never been anywhere remotely close to 60 minutes. We have tried 5 minute sessions, but it was causing the occasional problem when someone would take more than 5 minutes to write a long post. We ended up settling back on the vBulletin default of 15 minutes, as you can see if you sort the user's online by time: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/online.php?order=asc&sort=time&pp=50&page=1 While stopforumspam works to an extent, the bigger the site, the more determined the spammers are... so it ends up being less and less useful. The custom things we have in play now end up being more reliable for us and the nature of the spammers. Stopforumspam is more useful for blocking the one-off "lowbie" spammers... Not so much when you are dealing with large enterprises who's sole purpose in life is to spam. That being said, we already ARE using stopforumspam... it catches maybe 2-3 users per day beyond the ones our custom system catches. Not really enough to make much of a difference. As far as only reporting 150 users online if we dropped it to a 5m session vs. a 15m, I'm fairly certain that would be incorrect... considering we get more than 1 user per second just coming in via organic Google search results. I believe Google Analytics treats a 60 second window as "online now"... so even with a 60 second window, it's over 400. [video=youtube;jO3W3RgmdPM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO3W3RgmdPM[/video]
-- edit -- NEVERMIND... gah, I'm used to forums listing users and guests -- not total users, then users, then guests. The nearly invisible grey on green made me think it wasn't content. The 174 online is a believable number -- my bad. Sorry, sorry, sorry, much apologizings. Zathras has great responsibilities, was thinking great thoughts, did not see you. Was looking for the One. Something else for me to fix in my user.css -- make all those grey bits of text actually reach accessibility minimums in terms of contrast to the background.
The main issue I've found with stopforumspam is that it's based on 3 things that are easily changeable by spammers... email address, IP address and username. If spammers used the same IP, username or email, then great... it would work flawlessly. Unfortunately the spammers we deal with aren't nice and do that for us. They use unique emails every registration, unique usernames and use unique IPs. Stopforumspam *would* find more than 2-3/day for us if we took out our existing systems. But when our system blocks someone, there's no reason to spin them through stopforumspam on top of it... we already blocked them. By sessions, I mean last activity... Our online users is anyone who have ACTUALLY done something in the last 15 minutes (regardless of their "stay logged in" option). It's a rather silly argument anyway though... we don't display a zillion users online because we feel we need to make others feel like there are a lot of people here. There *are* a lot of people, and I'd be fine having a 30s window for online users. But something that low ends up causing problems and support issues for us. If we actually were trying to be obnoxious, it would something stupid like 24 hours (which some forums do for God knows why)... then you would see something like 200,000 guests and 10,000 or so members logged in... Which would be retarded. I'd be fine to have that entire block just go away.
Going by your new title and username colour, you now know first-hand about the infraction and ban emails. Unfortunately, you found out the hard way that your friend was lying. If you use the Spy feature, you will see how active the mods are. You'll also notice that most (I don't know about all) are native English speakers: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showgroups.php
You know, the Op's bit about banning you guys keep quoting... Friend of mine mentioned being banned here a year or two ago, and my mind couldn't accept the idea of being banned... here. Seriously, how much of a ****-up do you have to be to get banned... HERE!?!?! This has been in my experience one of the most open and permissive sites I've ever dealt with... I should know, I'm not welcome a whole slew of places filled with thin skinned little granola metrosexual wussies who've probably never held a REAL job in their lives. Pretty much every post I've made on this site would result in the little pansies on certain other sites getting their knickers in a twist and crying to a mod... The mere notion of getting banned HERE... unless you're in the 'obvious spam is obvious' or just flat out posting NSFW... I can't conceive it. ... and no, I'm NOT saying that as a bad thing. Frank open discussions are a good thing... as opposed to slapping the rose coloured glasses on everyone's heads, leading them down the garden path to sing kumbaya around a drum circle... where every post you're dancing on egg-shells and when someone asks for a review if you post anything other than "great job" it's suddenly a personal attack... Certain sites it's bad enough to make you want to tell everyone to "grow a pair... or borrow Hillary's". Admittedly, this does make this site a bit more ... mercenary. I used to say that as a slight, but I've started to think that too may not be the worst thing you could say about a website's community.
No one gets banned "for nothing" here or simply because staff doesn't like them. In fact, you have to go pretty far out of your way and do things that are clear violation of our rules (repeatedly) to be banned. That being said, we *will* give infractions when you break our rules... and if you get enough infractions, you will end up banned. There are more than 100,000 accounts that we've flat out deleted for being duplicate accounts alone.