In the past 6 months I've noticed more and more premium members on DP being banned. This is outrageous. You constantly invite users with nag popups to consider upgrading their account for various benefits, yet then ban them after they've forked over a huge chunk of cash? I would never in 1,000 years buy the premium membership on DP because of this, especially since so much of the penalty system on DP deals with wildly unpredictable "infractions" for posting on the wrong section. I've been using DP for years, yet I still get infractions every few months for posting in the wrong section. It seriously is impossible to know when a moderator is going to decide your "WTS $5 blog post" thread belongs in Cheap Stuff instead of Link Sales. There is no logic or consistency to it whatsoever. At the very least there should be a "re-consideration of membership" policy for banned premium members. You guys are foolish for not valuing premium members as customers of Digital Point instead of lording over them with fear of getting banned. You ask for their name, phone number, and money, yet ban them after 20,000 posts and 5 years of loyalty?? Wow!! It creates another problem. You request users to only have 1 account, yet, there is absolutely no incentive for members to be honest about their identity when they will probably be banned by DP mods at some point anyway. If I'm the owner of "Blue Marketing" and I choose the username "bluemarketing" on DP and give my name, homepage, phone number, and pay for premium upgrade, and then get banned... well now I'm screwed. Your cruel and foolish approach encourages dishonesty, spamming, and complete distrust of your brand and staff. No wonder most high tech members have fled to Warrior Forum. I don't complain just to complain, I seek solutions! I'm more than willing to help DP organize a better system for premium members... but the truth is that I know you won't consider it. My 2 cents, ban me if you wish
The rules arent that hard to follow, and if one gets an infraction they do have an expiration. Somebody'd have to be a helluvalot less than bight to get ten points before any of them expired... in which case a ban is just a matter of chlorinating the gene pool for a while. The idea that members should get another ID just in case tells people your integrity is lacking. So basically your post waters the tree of logic the same way dogs water fire hydrants. Get a grip.
The is logic and consistency , what is sometimes lacking is clarity and speed of response but nothing is perfect . Who ever said that life is fair and easy , if you don't like it here move on . Also I'd ban you because you're a dishonest SoB claiming that your location is in Team America (implying that you're in the USA) when you're in Thailand .
So you think it would be a good idea to let some random spammer create 100 spam threads in a day with absolute ban immunity just because he paid for premium membership? Premium membership would be quite a nice investment in that case for spammers, wouldn't it? First of all, if anyone considers premium membership a "huge chunk of cash", then they really should not be buying it... they should be saving their money. We actually encourage people to NOT buy premium membership if they have issues with getting infractions or account suspensions... because the same rules still apply. In fact, in bold on the premium membership signup page: We don't ask for their name or phone number... not sure what you are talking about. But yes... all rules apply to all members. You could be user #2 with 50,000 posts... if you are spamming constantly or just too dumb to get a whole bunch of individually small infractions that your account is banned before they expire... well... they would be better off on another site instead. We give people an incentive to not create duplicate accounts. By not creating a duplicate account, you end up not being banned for creating duplicate accounts. You could make the same argument about we don't incentivize users to not spam enough... Lol... if people want to hang out on a site that revolves around everyone selling newbies $5 get rich quick schemes... well... cool I guess? lol We are always open to suggestions... but your suggestion of giving premium members global immunity to being banned is beyond impractical and a little silly. Okay, we'll ban you if we wish... {rolls eyes} Bottom line is that premium membership is not intended for everyone... if it was, it wouldn't be premium, now would it? Random fact for you... More than 60% of the premium members don't use the forum (which also means there's not a whole lot they could do even if they *wanted* to try and get banned).
Thanks for the conversation, allow me to reply. @robjones, I don't understand your reply. Gene pool? Huh? You sound like a teenage gamer on a WoW BBS. Give me a break. The "life isn't fair" response is always quite unhelpful. Anyway, do I sound Thai? Have you ever traveled outside of your home country and logged in to DP? Guess not... I think you all misunderstand my point. Spamming is bad, always. But 99% of users who have reached 5,000+ posts or even 1,000+ posts are likely not spamming, they are merely getting banned for too many infractions. In other words, they are getting banned for being too involved on DP, in a sense. If DP consulted with a 3rd party user-retention marketing firm, they would flip out about this! Suggestion: reduce infraction expiry times to be MUCH shorter, at least for long-time members. I barely ever post on DP, I mostly use the PM system, yet I still manage to have constantly rolling-over infractions. Call me names, if you wish. Another suggestion: allow long-time members to "bump" more than 1 thread per month, perhaps 2-3 threads per month. This will dramatically reduce infractions IMO. It is eye-opening that you chose to respond this way, and should scare off any long-time members considering buying the premium membership. For one thing, some mods go down your post list and give you 5 infractions in one day. When you have thousands of posts across dozens of boards, do you see why this may create a big problem for long-time members esp. with your inconsistent moderation team? Believe it or not, I agree with you here. I've never liked WF which is why I'm posting my feedback here. I don't want to make enemies; I want DP to be BETTER. I've always been on the DP train, but you are starting to make it hard to be a loyal fan. Forums will always stick around, because they offer levels of anonymity while allowing members to create some sort of reputation at the same time while doing business etc. But if we don't have confidence that 5 years of building our reputation on DP means anything, because ban-happy mods may pull the trigger at any given time without any chance to appeal the whole process, well... for shame. I respect your success Shawn, and while DP's Alexa rank may be staying high because of all the 3rd world countries logging in every day, the quality of your forum is going down, this is well-known around the blogosphere. I don't believe your high target markets are necessarily Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines...? http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digitalpoint.com It would behoove you to listen to feedback, before DP continues down the path of being a hangout for the "I just learned about SEO yesterday but live in a country that is banned by PayPal and create 10 DP accounts per day to sell brokered text links" crowd on one side, and the "I agree with anything Shawn says" crowd on the other. Cheers folks ~ P.S. whichever anonymous user just gave me negative reputation for this Feedback thread, thanks so much! I'm glad DP is so open to suggestions!
no i completely agree, and on the exact same note, i think that tax payers should never be allowed to be arrested or punished in any way or form for any crimes they commit.[ / end sarcasm ]
#1. Is it important where the forum members come from? No, but anyway... look around DP and you'll find long-term, reputable members who are from many countries in the so-called developing countries. Developing in business and making a lot of money! The target market for DP is anyone online who is interested in the topics the forum covers? #2. Alexa Rank is is a meaningless number, easy to manipulate and completely unreliable. Not every person in SEO, IM, webdevelopment, wants to bother with that rubbish toolbar. You should be looking at this instead: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/usermap.php
Well thankfully a user retention firm doesn't run this site. We will not compromise the integrity of the site just so we "retain" users. If a user has 1,000+ posts, it's fairly safe to assume they have learned the rules by now. And even then... it would require them to break our rules 10 times in a short period of time to actually be banned. The reality is if you use common sense, you aren't going to get banned. Most of the premium members that are banned probably ended up that way because they assumed they had some sort of immunity and were just trying to get away with something that they knew was stupid. Huh? Why would I call you names? How about I call you stupid for assuming I would call you names? lol If we are going to use you as an example... First of all, you have never been banned... the whole infraction expiration system is designed to do exactly that... let people know they are doing something wrong, but at the same time only ban the worst offenders. Your "worst" infraction was for spamming... you clearly have gone out of your way to do dumb stuff hoping you would get away with it. I mean let's be real here... did you *really* accidentally insert a semi-hidden link with just a period being the anchor text into your post... And again... even though you tried spamming hidden links, you *still* weren't banned. Yeah, no... The only way bumping is going to be of any extra value to you would be if you could bump more often, but all other users could not. If everyone bumps their thread once a week instead of once a month, well... you are back to the same issue of everything being buried too quickly. There really isn't much inconsistency to be honest. If users don't want to follow our rules, they will end up banned. If they do follow our rules, they won't... simple really. {shrug} I think you are getting "inconsistent moderating" confused with "I don't like your rules, so I'm not going to follow them"... Well like I said, we are always open to suggestions... just some are impractical... Giving premium members absolute immunity to break all our rules without the risk of being banned is not a practical suggestion. The reality is that moderation is subjective because it's done by humans. My job is to watch over it all and make sure it's relatively unbiased and somewhat consistent. There have been cases in the past where a moderator overstepped their bounds and they were immediately removed as a moderator (there was no warning or discussion about it). There have been cases of accidental infractions (like someone gave it to the wrong person/post... and when we run across those, they are always reversed/fixed). If you have an example of an actual incorrect infraction (that wasn't reversed), let me know and I'll take a look... Yep... it's an unfortunate thing that's been happening in all forums these days. There has no doubt been a flood of people who barely speak English and ask the same idiotic questions. But... it's also been happening on every forum that I've been a part of. It's just a matter of what sort of unique things we can do to curb it (we do a LOT actually on the backend to prevent as much of it as we can). Thankfully, this site is still predominantly US users... but US users also don't feel the need to post crap, so it sometimes seems otherwise. We could actually just ban all of India, Pakistan, China and Indonesia and the overall traffic of the site wouldn't be affected all that much, but there would be FAR fewer shitty posts. Realtime analytics for this site clearly shows US being dominant (followed by the UK and Canada): [video=youtube;jO3W3RgmdPM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO3W3RgmdPM[/video] Low quality users from certain geographical regions are certainly not something we are blind to. We've done a lot to curb it... and we have some unique ideas to curb it massively in the future (requires some backend coding). Globally banning those countries is something I think about on occasion, but it's also the easy solution, not the better one. Exactly this... It tends to be users on those "third world" countries that have the Alexa toolbar installed... so they show up as an inordinate higher percent since Alexa is just a sample of people who have the toolbar installed. If you look at 1000 users from the US and 1000 users from India, it would not surprise me if 200 user sin India had Alexa installed vs. 1 in the US.
I dont know a ton of reputable US web professionals that have the Alexa tool on their dash... and if you count keyboards instead of usernames the stats for any forum don't have near as many from those countries as it appears. Take my word for that one. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. The "I learned SEO yesterday" questions are primarily just a handful of goofballs in a smattering of countries in and around India. Those dumb threads are intentional. Sad that this passes for SEO in certain quarters... even sadder they have yet to figure out this dumb form of linkbuilding is taking place in a no-follow forum and their sig links are worthless. Or maybe they're tossing in invisible links too? Seriously... I wouldn't take advice on running a forum from someone that does that. They're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem.
Shawn, he never said to implement absolute immunity, where did you get that from? Also your real time video is real time which means the spammers were sleeping taking a rest from their spam while you were recording the stats. Shawn is free to do what he wants with his site and he seems to be in love with the 3rd world, so let it be. But he must be aware of that there are too many retards and mentally illed people around here. The suggestion is impractical as said earlier but the moderators seem to be too system fixed.
Did you read the title of this thread? "NEVER ban premium members". And yes... regarding the video, obviously there's timezones to deal with since it was realtime. If you look at overall recent visitors by region though... 6% from India... and far more than their fair share (6%) of spam and useless posts... Nope, not at all... internally we are already treating certain geographical regions differently for some things to curb it. But there are much bigger/better ideas in the works.
Ahh, the posts imply something else. Ok, now the problem is not the spam but rather getting the US users more active to dilute the spam.
Well I'm always open to new ideas on how to curb spam/useless posts. I couldn't imagine what it would be like without all the custom stuff we are already doing. One idea I had was have a sort of sponsorship program. Certain geographical regions could only get an account if an existing member invited them. And if the user was crappy, the inviter would also get a percent of the invitee's infractions. Then really only people that someone can truly vouch for would get invites... And the inviter would probably try to help the new user understand the rules... Since their account is at stake.
@ryan_uk, thanks for the negative feedback on my account. Anyone who thinks I'm racist while sitting in a 3rd world country myself surrounded by every shade of red, yellow, black, and white must be illiterate. The only color I care about on Digital Point is green. Lol... yeah... I was probably trying to rank high on Google for people searching for periods! More likely I was simply testing the new nofollow system or something and then got locked out of editing my post. Honestly I can't remember but I apologize for coming across like an diabolical user of punctuation marks. Nah, I meant one bump per-thread, with 2-3 bumps allowed per month, or whatever. Most of the users I do business with on DP are from these countries. For the record, the annoying-est users are mostly from India and Pakistan, but its the 80/20 rule on that like everything else in life, with 20% being awesome businessmen. Most of the users from Indonesia and Philippines are rather savvy in my opinion. Quality control is needed yes but alienating mass amounts of fans, or people who happen to travel (yours truly) is not the best idea. Frankly, if this forum were mostly US or UK sellers, I would probably leave as their prices are too high and their attitudes are not conducive to customer service. This is sort of like communism in that it sounds great on paper but fails in the real world. Unless DP is going to consult Facebook or Yelp on their multi-million dollar security monitoring solutions to prevent VPNs and low quality users from registering dozens of accounts, these types of things won't work in reality. Plus, what businessman has time to train some noob on forum etiquette? We have money to make. Plus plus plus, this comes from a DP-centric viewpoint, as if there aren't dozens of other forums out there that spring up every day without such weird processes for being active members. I share my thoughts with respect, but just trying to be blunt about my opinion. P.S. ... the reason this thread title and first post are a bit dramatic-sounding was simply to get some attention! Christ people, this is a marketing forum is it not?... Some of this thread is getting hijacked so let me re-iterate my points: 1. premium members should be cherished more 2. permabans should not be a common thing for long-time members 3. the DP staff's frustration with spam and annoying users seem to be hurting #1 and #2 We can break down user regulation into 3 main categories: - time - space - money Most spammers on DP are coming here to sell their products and services. Rather than requiring minimum post counts which encourage low quality posts by thousands of members trying to reach their quota (outdated system, and DP is too big for this anyway), perhaps you may control by way of money. Like real estate, money is the best way to control neighborhood quality. For example, here are some ideas: - forget about "space" related regulations (geographic per-region basis) as VPNs, expats, etc will render this counter-intuitive - force a minimum character count on posts coming from newbies, to reinforce their understanding that pointless posts are unnecessary - charge $5 for every thread bump, with unlimited bumps allowed, but newbies can't bump (time + money) - no time/age limits on posting in Services area etc, but must have at least 5 itrader points acquired by making purchases only (money + relative time + buy before you sell = avoids created-last-night empty PayPal accounts) - this may require dividing itrader into 2 sides - buyer points and seller points, where overall member score isn't effected but these 2 halves can be used for regulation etc - or better yet, simply start charging for new DP accounts, this will keep away scammers and users who don't accept PayPal or have empty PayPal accounts (and will scare cheap-ass users from Pakistan etc into following the rules) - allow an "appeal/dispute" process for itrader points/transactions, hire customer service staff to deal with these (will stop many users from creating new accounts or scammers from leaving false negatives) - allow members to appeal certain infractions/bannings - if they really did something wrong, charge them a re-activation fee (i.e. $100) These are a few ideas off the top of my head. This would not take a difficult PayPal API, you could setup a wallet/deposit system on DP and keep it simple. The point is Shawn you could triple the revenue that DP is bringing in literally overnight, while actively and rapidly bringing the quality of DP to an impressive new level. We are here to make money on the internet, the only people that will complain are the users who are here trying to scam or rip people off in the first place. Just as you finally listened to members who wanted to be able to change their username but starting charging them a fee to do so, you can bring that philosophy to a whole new level before successful internet marketers start making all their purchases on Fiverr etc. Anyway cheers ~
I am kinda checking forum out and I agree with OP. I am also in Warrior and Hackforums. The same thing happens there as well. mods discretion can vary to vastly. In HF 1 wrong post can get you a 7 day ban without being heard. I read the rules. There are different rules for each thread and those rules change. There are different mods with different views. So I feel it's a good idea to have a warning system in place for upgraded members or 2nd chance incentive. There's going to be times when good members make a mistake. It's pretty easy for a mod to notice someone spamming 1000 times as digitalpoint used as 1 of his examples but OP wasnt referring to that type of behavior. Upgraded members should be looked at a little diiferent. Im glad I saw this thread, I will be content as a peon for a while and let other forum reps speak for credibility.Good thread OP
Why would the upgraded members be looked at different? They have to obey the rules like us regular folks. If i could do whatever i wanted on this forum and self promote all the time as a upgraded member, i'd upgrade in a heart beat. I think Shawn needs a few beers after posting in this thread. Rob Jones is buying.
Better be cheap beer then. That idea's as practical as giving paid members a get-outta-jail-free card for all infractions. [Shawn - You sure that isnt a really big urine sample?]