Hmmm... perhaps you should check that out with your previous employers. They think they fired you. You know full well I'm not making anything up.
Not sure what you are trying to do Minstrel, but doesn't it get old to follow me around and try to discredit me any chance you get? Get real, man. Why exactly I'm so important to you, I have no clue. What was the topic again before you've changed it?
I believe we were talking about you, hypocrisy, deception, and self-promotion... they seem to go together naturally. We were talking about you hopping into popular threads to (a) promote your blog posts, digg comments, or whatever else is the thing of the moment, and (b) attacking other people accusing them (untruthfully) of doing the same thing. I believe if you check back to the start of this thread that will ve easy to verify.
So, SEOChat... Beep beep. Why would anyone make the site so slow and unusable ? Even if there was good information I wouldnt waste anytime searching for it there anymore. Surely even the most basic webmaster knows the majority of users wont wait even if the information is the best available.
Thanks for trying to get things back on track DA. I will make one more statement. I wrote that article on my personal blog. I wrote it because it interests me and it seems to have interested a couple of other people. I personally respect some people I met through that community and whether or not someone else does, I don't care. I spent several years contributing to that community so if I want to write about it, I will. Any promotion my take on things has gotten, doesn't beneifit me in the least because it is a personal blog with no ads or any other means of revenue (and it will stay that way) Those are my opinions, take them or leave them. Try to attack my character all you want but at the end of the day, I just don't care. I'm still going to do whatever I want. So suck it up, buttercup.
This is the first time I've ever wanted to be a mod, so I couldve locked this thread before having to read that I really dont see that many lessons to be learnt from SEOChat. Ruin the user experience for profit, control from too high and far away, relying on gimmicks, abusing and not consulting your core team who have dedicated their time and effort to/for you (regardless if they are paid or not), not involving those that use the site in any kind of discussion. The only thing I can never understand is why webmaster forums think they have a chance of getting away with anything sneaky and not losing out. Mambo & SEOChat are 2 perfect examples of lack of user consultation or involvement, but there are many many more. It astounds me (though I dont run any high profile sites) that these common sense concepts (usually learnt in the first month of web design) are not stuck to.
You can't make things too complicated for members, I think that is what happened at SEO Chat, most forums are policed by their own members, you really don't need heavy handed focus on "content control" or shaping they flow of the thread! When moderators try to form and shape each thread to "forum standards" it frustrates forum members when they see good threads that they are following censored, locked or moved to a moderators forum (deleted) for management to discuss how "this major tragic event" happened. This happened on WPW so many times (in very hot-fantastic threads) that the forum was ruined by "moderator control" (CBP & gang). The same thing happened as SEO chat, the advertising banners may have been a small part of why members left and the signature issues seem to have been the tipping point, but bad thread management by moderators is the NUMBER ONE FACTOR in forum destruction! It causes your best posters to leave when they see their efforts thrown away by management when threads are taken down for no good reason!
Sooo... is anyone on the first page of this thread getting any decent traffic from their sig links since it's dugg and shouted?
Toot is Blobmaster. First he called himself sitetutor -> TOOT -> Toots. Then, he was "let go" from his job at sitetutor.com and asked not to use that name any longer so he changed his name here to MikeDamman (although he continues to use his old name on numerous other forums). Then, for reasons unknown, he changed his name here again to Blobmaster. I think he may have been hoping for some boost in popularity or brand recognition from the association with "Thighmaster" Same guy.
TOOT = Sitetutor = Blogmaster = Frog Engine =Mike Damman = Blog Party = ......... = ........= ........... you fill in the blanks......
Whew. It's a good thing all 7 pages of this thread have been so worthwhile. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If there is anyone still reading this thread for substance regarding the initial post, yfs1's blog post was a very fair assessment from my point of view (I was invited to be a mod just before most of the old mods quit). I added my 2 cents to ysf1's blog comment stream.
Sorry Bernard, it is now a thread about TOOT man Threads always seem to focus on TOOT once he enters them for some reason, then we get links to follow to his forum to finish up the topic.....
This is quite an amusing thread. I like it - a lot! I learned a lot at SEO Chat - all of it came from the contents of their threads, so I'm guessing that some were ok. I've never tried to SEO out of a paper bag though - sounds like fun - I normally do it out of my mind (pun intended). SEO Chat was a great place - I had a lot of fun there. The fun has gone and there doesn't seem to be a lot of point in discussing what happened in too much detail unless we're worried about making the same mistakes. Thanks to SEO Chat and its members, I have found a new sport and have managed to drag (even my) sites into the first pages of our beloved search engine results. I haven't found a resource so useful since everybody left. During the short time I was a regular member (I still am a member) there was a great mix of personalities which inspired fun and provoked results. I can't see how anybody can say it was bad. It was great. Just my O MCS x
To keep this back on topic, I'm curious about why mods stayed as long as they did in light of the insights that they had on the behind the scenes issues. Dave