What's wrong with DP?! Something went really wrong!

Hello Dear DP members,

I just want to say, that DP has changed a lot for the past 2 years, changed for the bad!! I remember 2 years ago DP forum was my favorite place to visit. I was visiting the site like 15-20 times a day! everything was interesting here, so much discussions, Any thread would receive so much replys instantly and everything was active and moving.

Now DP seems dead, so many threads without replys haning out for days. Doesn't seem anything like it was before.

The site had many changes for the last years, I don't know what exactly went wrong, but something definitely is!!

I would really love to see the old DP, community was so cool back then.

Some new users might now understand me, but beleive me it was much better 2 years ago.

 

I am pretty new, but I understand you very well. What plagues this forum are the "SEO" guys that think that spamming forums with useless threads/questions will do any good.

Whenever I read a new thread, it's almost always one (or all) of the following

Written in very poor english
A stupid, stupid question
wrong section
link drop
blatant advertising
"I agree"

I am sure that the admins and mods do what they can (the list of banned people must be huge).

 

As for me, what I absolutely hate replying to... are questions that sound so dumb. And that's probably why you don't see that many replies on threads anymore. When I say dumb, it's when the person asking sounds absolutely clueless, that you know no matter what you say he'd never get it. And we are full of that kind of people now, who are trying to break it big into the business overnight.

I have never experienced being scammed in my many years here as a seller and a buyer, except for this year and I currently have 3 successive open disputes on my Paypal right now, when I've never even experienced one before.

People pay using credit card fraud, open claims of unauthorized transactions, it absolutely horrifies me as an honest seller. This is the kind of people we have to deal with now, so if the forum is less-friendlier than what you remember it to be, it's because it's hounded by dumb-asses who don't know anything but wanna get rich quick using other people's resources and knowledge.

 

There are like four levels of idiot and retards here:

• Level 4 idiot: Actually knows nothing, usually speaks English as a second language, does not add anything to the forum, but is not intentionally trying to spam... they are just ignorant.
• Level 3 idiot: Speaks English but you wouldn't know it from reading their posts, does not add much to the forum, 95% of their posts are useless and suck.
• Level 2 idiot: Self described SEO "expert" usually from India/Pakistan/some where other than USA, UK, Canada. They post idiotic questions, they shill their own crap in threads, they sell useless products and services. Their English may or may not suck.
• Level 1 idiot: Your all encompassing scammer group. This includes Americans and non-Americans and is anyone who posts useless shit trying to separate people from their money while not providing anything worth a damn. This ranges from scam buyers, to scam sellers, to people selling useless services and ebooks.

I left off all the idiots who posts useless shit in P&R or General Chat. The P&R has a special subset of idiot who are also fanatics. Churchill has a nice quote about them, "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject". General Chat is where idiots without confidence go to spam the forum. I know there are some people who do not speak English well - there are tons of them who nonetheless manage to add value to the forum. But when people decide to post it should at least make a modicum of sense and add a tiny bit of value to the place as a whole.

I wish their was something other than simply reporting a bad post that we could do. I wish their was a way to tag a member as totally useless and worthy of banishment. It would save a lot of mod effort to just get rid of the dead weight instead of waiting until they exhaust their 10 points.

Edit:
Here is an example (while it stays up) of a Level 1 idiot. These guys come here every week with a new account and start trying to sell fake passports. Either they are total scammers and give you nothing after taking your money, or they are just crminals selling fake passports to anyone. Either way, they are the level 1 idiots I was referring to: Buy fake passports,buy fake id card,buy fake drivers license,sale passports online

 

I completely agree OP. Third world "developers" are replacing established professionals. I shudder to think how DP will be in a few years time...

I remember DP had an amazing ratio of quality back in 2005 when I joined. Less and less I see posters with join dates from many years ago.

 

Most of the people are here to participate in BST forum, don't tell me no. The amount of people from the 3rd world has flooded the forum that people in developed countries can't make a living anymore. If you dig a bit, you'll see some US/UK people looking for cheap services often paying pennies.

If you go on another forum, let's say Wicked Fire, you'll see a notice something along "keep the fight for pennies for DP". So if you're looking for slaves, this is the place.

 

Mhh... haven't seen one. Seems you are deleting them to quick .

Could you copy/paste one?

 

Yeah those nigerian scams are so funny that I'd name this place ScamPoint.

 

I really think that this is the evolution(or involution) and we just have to adapt to nowadays. I am new arround here but from what i understand things were different in 2005 . Yeah , but than , internet was not that accesible world wide and spamming wasn't as it is today. Things change and will allways change. I will stick arround and see what's wrong with this forum, IF something is really wrong after all.

 

Believe me, spamming was just as bad online back then. Forum spam, poisonous search results, etc. Contrary to the tinfoil hats, search results are far cleaner now compared to back in 2004, 2005, 2006, etc. (Ironically, it's the tinfoil hats that make a lot of spam anyway.) It was a daily occurrence back then that I would end up clicking through to a cloaked site or heavily keyword stuffed page, for example.

What you'll eventually start to notice in DP is the same idiot questions that are posted on a regular basis in the SEO section in particular (usually starting "what is"). You'll find the same rubbish duplicated on several other forums, with the same signature links. (One person even once posted and forgot to remove the question number - so I assume it's a group of spammers with a numbered list.) Or in SEO/link development you'll find people responding to posts without even reading the question (for example, someone sees the word forum in the question and then responds about how "important" for SEO it is to post - spam! - your signature links and links in posts).

I don't think it's quite as dead as the OP mentioned (at least the Google, SEO and link development are full of idiot posts). Just a genuinely interesting thread is becoming rarer.

 

What do you mean "tinfoil hats"? What do they have to do with third world spam?

You mean the very thing that makes the forum?

 

it's almost all dead ryan, everywhere I see posts that are badly formatted, for example posts not capitalized, badlyspaced, much typpo and mistakes grammatical, you get the point. And even more almost no value is being given. If someone asks if you're allowed multiple PayPal accounts then the rest of the half million members have to respond the same answer. Telling us to report each post is not the way to go (even one big report), because if I was to, I'd click delete on the forum database, puff spam erased. Actually, I'm not helping anyone out anymore, I'm here solely for the BST forum.

 

See my post here:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2529253&p=17907711#post17907711

I really do think a lot of the endless/pointless/crap advertising, combined with the fat bloated idiotic vBull 4 skin, combined with the rotate your password garbage... just scared away a lot of legitimate users.

With me that's what happened, I stopped visiting as frequently because it got annoying, then when it asked me to change my PW and I couldn't even remember what e-mail I registered from, I said "to hell with it" and just stopped coming here. If I hadn't gotten a e-mail about a PM from someone I actually like, I wouldn't have bothered coming back... and to come back I had to do all the things I outlined in that post above to neuter this site back down into something useful.

I don't mind an ad or two if their placed subtle off to one side -- but the endless annoying rubbish that made every pageload took >30 seconds here on top of the completely inaccessible ineptly coded layout?

What do I mean inept?

div class="navpopupbody popupbody popuphover"><table><tr><td class="jump_home" colspan="6"><a href="http://forums.digitalpoint.com">Forum Home</a></td></tr>

Code (markup):

Pointless wrapping div around tables for layout?

div id="pagetitle" class="pagetitle">
<h1>Forum: <span class="forumtitle">HTML &amp; Website Design</span></h1>
<p class="description">Place to talk about website design and get help with HTML, CSS, DHTML, etc.</p>
</div>


<div id="above_threadlist_controls" class="above_threadlist_controls toolsmenu">
<div>
<ul class="popupgroup forumdisplaypopups" id="forumdisplaypopups">
<li class="popupmenu nohovermenu" id="forumtools">
<h6><a href="javascript://" class="popupctrl" rel="nofollow">Forum Tools</a></h6>
<ul class="popupbody popuphover">

Code (markup):

endless pointless classes and ID's with nonsensical/gibberish heading orders? how about heading tags around non-heading elements?

Dig in deeper and you see definition list abuse for tabular data, more of the endless pointless div and classes for nothing, a complete lack of semantic markup -- we're talking 189k of some of the worst markup I've ever seen for less than 10k of plaintext and zero actual content images/objects... only a factor of eight to ten times what should be used.

It's always a laugh when a web development forum's code is that bad -- Not you guys fault, you've kind-of been shoe-horned into vBull thanks to the legacy, and now you're paying the price due to a rubbish upgrade/new version...

What is your fault is all the stupid extra crap tacked on top -- for every advert conversion you've lost dozens of legitimate users.

 

I only noticed this the other day. Gotta love the XHTML document parsed as HTML.

I for one am glad you chose to stick around.

 

@sarahk -- funny, I'd look for the parent ID, then for any DEL tags -- actually I don't mind thins like 'deleted' or unique values... or a parent ID... what I mind is when there are endless pointless ones doing the job of ONE. The old joke, if every element inside a container that already has an ID on it is getting the same class, none of them need classes!

I mean where they have:

<div class="navpopupbody popupbody popuphover"><table><tr><td class="jump_home" colspan="6">

Code (markup):

I'd have

<ul id="jumpMenu">

Code (markup):

That mess of classes is just idiotic BS... as is the colspan (meaning it's likely doing CAPTION's job) .. on a section that isn't even tabular data.

That latter example though -- ugh... heading tag inside a list that skips five heading levels? All those DIV for absolutely NOTHING? Class identical to the ID? Zero scripting off fallbacks?

<div id="forumHeader">
	<h2>Forum: <span>HTML &amp; Website Design</span></h2>
	<p>
		Place to talk about website design and get help with HTML, CSS, DHTML, etc.
	</p>
	<ul id="forumToolsAndSearch">
		<li>
			<a href="forumTools.php?f=3" rel="nofollow">Forum Tools</a>
			<ul>

Code (markup):

You need more 'hooks' than that, you're doing something wrong! Either that or you don't know how to use childNode/parentNode/nextSibling... NOT that I usually give a flying *** about javascript; 99% of the time I use user.js (opera's equiv to greasemonkey) it's to rip things out, not add them in.