I've been a member here for 5 years and this site is nothing what it used to be. There used to be spammers and not so helpful people sure, but it's really out of hand now. Posting in the BST part of the forum results in 20 PMs from spammers with ALL dropped domains and spun content. It's nearly impossible to get legit backlinks here anymore. All the for sale sites are trash 2 weeks old spun content. A post out of the BST area trying to open a dialog about anything results in one line incoherent responses just to get post count up or something. Seems like this forum is quickly declining. I don't know if you're willing to implement a regional ban but it seems like removing a few choice countries would fix the problem really fast.
LOL, I don't think banning "a few choice countries" will help. DP has always been diverse and there are great members (new and old) from all over the world. I do agree with some of your points: 1. For a while now (or at least the few times I kept popping back in) a lot of the sites listed for sale are of a dubious nature, but this is the same on a lot of forums (and cr@p services such as Flippa). DP has always had a good set of services and writers on offer (although there seem to be quite a few spam services - such as web 2.0 ones, as these are apparently on the "not allowed" list, but plenty there and also some comment spamming services offered under the guise of "authority backlinks", for example). 2. Yes, a lot of posts seem to be for the sake of post count (people not reading the previous posts and engaging in dialogue, but rather posting exactly the same as has already been done so by 20 other people). 3. Like any forum, there are spammers, but the mods do make an effort and (mostly) act on reports. All forums have their problems (take WF for example, it just induces vomit immediately!), but DP is still a good place for information (once you start to filter out the drones).
I doubt we would ban geographical regions (although the thought has crossed my mind). But some sort of filtering system that an individual user could set (like not interested in reason posts or getting PMs from users in country xx) would be a little more realistic. It's been on my list of things to explore for awhile... Just haven't had time to do much with it.
Yea I understand banning a whole region would be a drastic action and only done in a last case scenario. I would definitely be interested in a white or black list to weed out forum posts as well as PMs. Don't think so? Make a post in BST and see all the spam offers you get from Indonesian and less often Filipino users. Not sure what it is about those countries in particular, but the complete garbage websites and spammers are from those two 80% of the time.
If it's via IP, how would you accurately do that, Shawn? My geographical region (when I'm at work) is probably USA or Germany (because the IP is registered on Hanover Ave or something like that in California!) as even though I'm physically based in the UK, the company seems to use US-registered IPs (maybe even routes the traffic first to the USA over their own network, but never looked into it that deeply). People can also use proxies (although these can usually be detected), and there are very cheap shared VPN services (like $5/month for 750 IPs).
I didn't come across it yet*, but recently just made enquiries about some websites. They all turned out to be scams though. Booohooo! *The last three spammers/scammers to PM me were from: Egypt, India and Mauritius (according to the "True Country").
India is a pretty big offender to, but there are also a lot of legit Indian members on here. Your work must use a VPN. I wouldn't mind some sort of rating system for users where enough "down votes" gets your account reviewed by a mod.
Reviewed would be a lot of efforts for mods, but a down vote system could be good. Voting down of a post, as Rub3X mentioned, but makes it hidden as spam similar to like on YouTube, so people can still view it. Although this could lead to some posts being incorrectly hidden as spam. A spam count could be visible in the user's profile to mods when they are reviewing a reported post, for example. Also posting in some sections doesn't contribute towards post count (Introductions, General Chat, Suggestions & Feedback, etc).
Also, would it be possible to programmatically suggest some resources depending upon post content. For example: "how to see my website backlink?" -> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2456625 Such a common question. Or cr@p like this in the wrong section: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2456825 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2456687 (not even allowed on DP)
Now that I think about it a rating system would be awesome. Users could have a rating 1-100 and you could check settings to ignore private messages and forum posts that have a user rating under 70% or something. I don't know the volume of users on here to know whether reviewing would be out of the question. If the system were to only send people to review if they have x number of down votes and are at lower than say 50% or something it only review the accounts the majority of people think are useless.
That would be perfect. You could probably also modify that plugin a bit so posts with negative ratings are deleted all together and not counted towards posts count. I think this would improve the overall quality while discouraging useless incoherent one sentence posts as well. *Nudges admin*
If people used it *properly*, then yes... it would be good. The problem is that you also have to factor in how many users are retards and would just try to use it to bury competitors posts/threads or work out "deals" with other users so they are helping each other to promote their crap posts. The idea itself is good, but the underlying functionality is the easy part... Making it so it can't be abused is a bit harder.
Banning individual countries sounds xenophobic IMO and you would have a backlash, without a doubt. In my opinion, rightly or wrongly, you need more moderators. There are some good moderators and some not so good. Adding a number of extra mods would significantly reduce the amount of crap you'd have to read to get to anything decent. I've only been a member at this form for just over 18 months and the decline even since i've joined will mean it's pointless renewing the premium membership.
Funnily enough, I was reading on BBC News that India has overtaken USA for email spam (not that Indians are spammers, just lax security on PCs being exploited to spam with). I've no idea where the mindless moron is that started the following thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2454484 (Another example, different user: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2455518) But if you search (not just DP but in Google), you'll see a few things: most of their threads are pointless questions (the type that could easily be generated by a bot: "What is..."); most of the threads exist on other forums under the same (or sometimes different) usernames. Seems to also be a fair number of new uses who make a post by copying and pasting someone else's, sometimes with a failed attempt at embedding an image in the post. Weird things that people do instead of some kind of worthwhile discussion.
Not really it's logical. When I post a thread on the links forum I get 30 spam PMs, over 90% from Indonesia, Philippines, and India. To be fair it says 80% of spam comes from hacked computers
Well, you are also asking to buy links... which is kind of spammish in itself... so it really shouldn't be a huge surprise that annoying spammers message you when you are looking for what more or less amounts to spam. Not that it makes it okay or desirable of course... but if you go into a seedy part of town looking to buy crack, don't be surprised when you find yourself surrounded by crackheads.
Yep, and with a small bit of effort, a lot of it's easy to block (by the ISPs/network providers). If only it was as easy to filter out on DP...
How is it logical? Removing some potentially good contributions from those countries because of others is wrong. Why should some people suffer because of others. This place needs more moderators, and moderators who are active daily. That way the rules would be upheld. We're having a debate about banning countries and the threads mentioned above are still right there, shouldn't then have been taken down by now?