As for the grammar, this forum is popular worldwide. People from all over the world write here. So it's quite normal that some of the posts are written badly. Yes, it could be annoying sometimes, but hey... nobody is obligated to reply on poor grammar posts, right?
DP is really popular so it's doing something right. You can plenty of quality in you know how to look.
You're right, and nobody is obligated to click on spammy results when searching in Google either. The problem is when you have 10 meaningless replies in broken English when someone asks a serious question. The problem is that there is a corralation between people not trying hard to spell correctly and not really caring whether or not they contribute here. I know a lot of people whose second language is English who take their time writing, everyone knows what they're saying, and unless they have something to say, they don't. The problem is that those are the ones who post to increase their post count. This has been an ongoing problem. I write Spanish like they write in English and when I am on a Costa Rican forum, you better believe I do my best to contribute regardless of the language barrier. I actually try a lot harder to make up for my poor grammar. Most of those guys however have no respect, and why should we give them any airtime when all they come here for is scam, get a piece of the pie without contributing and in the meantime lower the levels of conversation on DP.
Yes, that rather hits the nail on the head for me. It might sound harsh to criticise bad spelling and grammar. My own posts won't be perfect and this isn't an English literature board. That aside, there's a lot of people doing a lot of very poor quality posts, usually without the slightest care in the world for how those posts appear. They're not posting to make a meaningful contribution, nor are they trying to gain information in return. They are just posting for the sheer hell of posting and, I suspect, for the benefits that may or may not be associated with having sig links attached. When people are posting for no other purpose than to get their sig seen, a board can go downhill very quickly if these kinds of posts are left unchallenged.
I agree wholeheartedly with Altyfc (hi mate ). The level of discourse and grammar does not match up to other forums. It's a pity these fantastic forums have denigrated so much and I hope those in charge can swing it to have more of an emphasis on quality rather than quantity.
A lot of our problems are due to DP's success in the SERPS. DP ranks for a good number of odd search terms -- which brings in a lot of people who are not webmasters. Another price of our success is that DP has been posted to several Islamic forums as the place for e-jihadists to come and do e-battle against free speech. Needless to say, the people this brings in do not tend to be webmasters. Theoretically, the General Chat forums could be blocked from Google and other search engines. Or, we could limit postings in those forums to members who have contributed in the core forums. Few of the trolls have the patience to contribute 50 posts in topic areas unrelated to their particular fanaticism. The other issue, of course, is that the business of selling forum signatures on DP is a lucrative trade for some of the Internet's most desperate denizens. We could limit this problem by not counting posts in the General Chat forums towards post counts. This would force them to create valuable posts on the core forums -- which would effectively raise their costs to the point where it broke their business model. Of course, the success of these strategies is critically dependent upon aggressive moderation of the core forums.
The general chat section keeps a lot of the off-topic posts out of the webmaster sections. Part of the success of DP is the high amount of traffic and users. There is literally something going on 24/7.
Hi Azam... good to see you doing the rounds. Something going on 24/7, yes... but is it quality? Will's idea of limiting 'General Chat' to people who had at least made a significant contribution to the main parts of the forum would strike me as a good, initial first step but one that I fear isn't sufficient to 'turn the tide' so to speak.
BTW, just as a case in point of the kind of thing I'm on about... look at this: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/search.php?searchid=12630667 Is it really necessary for someone to reply to every thread about a directory with a message that says "submitted my site, waiting for approval". I mean, this person has done this HUNDREDS of times and yet seemingly hasn't been called up on it. Sorry to point out one individual - it's just an example - I'm sure this kind of thing is true of many, many members here.
Well most ppl who do have serious threads. These threads are trash by all the one liner jokes. This seriously needs to stop. Should mods give infractions for this?
I think Will makes some great points. And pretty much nailed the issues surrounding the complete cesspit that P/R has become. It might help seriously if the majority of dead accounts were nuked as well. And these posts where the OP gets banned after making the post should just be deleted. There is a never ending line of ghost posters, lurkers and trolls that continually sign up, get banned, and come back. That much is true. I suppose you will have issues like that everywhere though, and I know of no way to stop that. I like the idea of hiding P/R and gen chat in general completely from the SE's. There's nothing of value there, and all it does is invite more ejihadists at Will suggested.
I believe mods should always use common sense and their own judgement and be supported by the forum owner in doing so. Unless of course the owner no longer parttakes in running the forum and nobody knows or cares anymore.
That post seemed to be removed . At least the mods are doing their work seriously. This is a huge forum, the mods definitely have a hard time checking on every thread and every post, we can do our part by reporting the inappropriate posts that we see.
I'm not sure if the post got removed, or whether searchid URLs just 'expire' after a certain period of time. I basically linked to the post history of one individual who had over 400 posts on here.... when you studied the posts, you could see several hundred replies to people advertising directories/search engines that they were running, with the simple message "submitted my site, waiting for approval" or something like that. It doesn't need me to point out that posts like that are completely pointless. OK, fair enough... I've no major bugbear with someone doing that once in a while but for 350+ of their 400 posts to be all like that (and the other 50 equally lame) is simply ridiculous. If something like that happened on one of my boards, the user would have be zapped before their post count even reached double figures.
Does Shawn never come in here anymore? I did a quick search and the last post I could find from him was March 2006.
Shawn's last post was 2 April. Heck, even Crazy_Rob hasn't posted since 9 June. I think we've burned 'em both out with all of our nuttiness.
I look at it this way, if I had a huge cash cow juggernaut would I sit in front of a computer 24/7 or milk it for all its worth? I think I'd choose the later. Too bad running a business requires more work than a forum...
Well... a lot of the rubbish is in there, but it seeps through to many other areas of the forums too, don't you think?
Wow. Every point you made I agree with... Wow. I really hate the drop in price in the marketplace. I am a graphic designer and it is almost impossible to get work because of the people selling "professional logos" for 3 dollars... I used to do templates as well but when a coded wordpress theme goes for $10 I really don't see the point anymore.