I don't want to rehash the specifics of the shoemoney thread, but I personally have a huge problem with the "outing" of people's sites on this forum. I have tons of sites that cover the full spectrum of white-gray-black. I try to contribute what I believe to be valuable insights to this forum. I have often been cautioned from people more experienced than I to NOT contribute in SEO forums because it is too easy to be "targeted". I doubt I'm alone in seeing threads like Shoemoney's and wondering what's the point in contributing here when this is the type of lynching mentality that can be expected. My preference would be that it be against the forum TOS for anyone to link a domain to a forum member. I realize I'm in the minority here. But, I gotta think a lot of experienced people here are less inclined to share information if we start seeing threads that list forum member's sites. Just my $.02, feel free to red rep and flame
I don't think anyone's a big fan (I know I'm not). And it has always annoyed me when people start digging around what I'm doing and then post about it here (and it happens often as you can imagine... IMO, people need to get a life and concentrate more on what THEY are doing than watch me or anyone else too closely). But then at the same time I don't really want to get into a situation where I'm telling people what they can/can't post... You start ending up with an overly moderated forum that only has stuff that I like (which is stupid).
Damn you and your openness! Yeah, I hate the idea of censorship generally. But I also hate seeing that kind of crap and then the pack of wolves mentality that follows... picking the lesser of two evils isn't easy (for me).
It took me about a year to get used to how closely people watch what I do. I still find it really annoying and unnerving at times. A perfect example was I changed the vBulletin "Archive" anchor text at the bottom to "Library". For no reason what-so-ever than I personally liked it better, and to do be different. All of a sudden I start seeing forums doing the same thing. Or if I set a page <title> to be something specific, I'll see other pages start showing up with identical titles. So I change mine, and they all follow within 24 hours. And of course the most annoying is "Why is Shawn's [insert whatever site here] site doing this? We all need to do this now!" There's a balance to be struck... if you "let" people see enough that they think they know everything, maybe they will stop looking. (Of course this doesn't apply to me, because I don't do anything interesting... I don't have time to running the forum and digitalpoint.com website and all. ). Truthfully, I don't even mind people looking at stuff... it's just when you get 100,000 people trying to replicate what was previously an original idea, it becomes annoying. Wait... what are we talking about? From now on, all threads are going to be approved by Nitin.
poor thing, it wouldn't be bad to have a no linking rule, but what about legitmate reason to link, or people who are total scammers, like fraud
Well, that might be going a bit too far. Just make me a mod and put in a block so noone can every mention MY name without my prior consent Yeah, I don't know. There are certainly times it makes sense because it's for the "greater good" ... but, I know I'm not the only one here that get's really turned off by the shoemoney outing. If someone is trying to sell people here a service and claiming facts based on it, then that's one thing to show others where the person is being fraudulent. But, if someone outs me and 10 of my blackhat cloaking sites (yeah, I have them ... and I really do it for testing and I don't give a flying f*** if you don't believe me! ) just cause they get off on outing me, well that's f'ed up and in my opinion doesn't belong on the forums.
I stopped reading the aforementioned thread about three lines into the post - I'm not trying to sound holier than thou, but personally, I usually immediately dismiss someone's rant; they're generally one-sided, biased, and oft off base. I'm not a spiritual person, but I do believe in karma to some extent I guess ... what goes around, comes around. If the shit stirrers are full of it - it'll catch up.
I agree with Nitin to a point. A lot of the Shoemoney thread has the tone of "let's bring the hotshot down a notch" and that I don't like. Even if he is running scraper sites with Adsense, what's the deal with that? It's between him and Google, IMO. Character assassination, like we see in that thread, is definately a reason for people to shy away from being in the spotlight here too much.
It's too bad people have it in their nature to even do this. It's funny the time and energy that someone waste to stir up shit when they could have been working on their own sites. I agree about the outing of sites... it's only going to hurt the community in the long run. People that actually know what there talking will be less likely to share information, tips and tricks. I already know a few people that shy away from posting b/c of this crap. The other thing that is a bit funny is that some people bitch about these auto generated sites but there is really no difference between that and those dumb db sites that are everywhere. 99% of the time the db sites are ripped off... the same jokes... same lyrics... same recipes.