Spam

[xYassassinYx]

I have been deleting sigs from people within their profiles though

Good work

[leporello]

Tbh, I think signature links need to be completely revised and maybe even removed altogether. PAL is obviously on a spammers list of dofollow forums and all the cheap ass SEO companies and spammers are coming in hoping for some link juice. Just remove the signatures until somebody actually becomes a real member of the community or adds something of value to PAL. That will prevent all this rubbish from appearing in everu second thread.

[Unknown Webmaster]

My impression is that most of the mods live in North America, and many of the people who complain about spam are come from Europe/Asia.

Adding an extra mod from Europe or Asia may help things.

Of course this won't do much good if people aren't reporting the posts.

[sirtiner]

If searchengines can't see signature links why not just write that somewere so when someone register for an account here, they see that and maybe they just dont continue on with the registration.

[pokerextras]

If searchengines can't see signature links why not just write that somewere so when someone register for an account here, they see that and maybe they just dont continue on with the registration.

fair point. I still can't work out the point of us having signatures at all. It's not like we get poker customers passing through here.

[Unknown Webmaster]

@Pokerextras
I think you are right that most people aren't getting much out of their signature links.

On the other hand I'm pretty sure that I have gotten a couple of links to my blog after people found it through my signature.

If I have read a bunch of good posts by someone, and know they run poker site x, then I will be much more inclined to offer them link exchanges or flat out just link to their site if it fits well with an article I'm writing.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who think that way though :-)

[FirstTimePokerPlayer]

Could there be another reason for people to try and ramp up their post count? (I know I was a little disappointed to find out I needed 30 posts before I could open a new thread in the market place...)

[Michael Martinez]

I'm not sure if you're asking why else people might inflate their post counts at PAL or just in general.

Some forums require you to reach one or more post thresholds to:

• Use signatures
• Include links in signatures
• Get nofollow removed from your signature links
• Use profile pages
• Include links in profiles
• Get nofollow removed from your profile links

etc., etc.

So far as I know, it has always been a rare, uncommon "SEO" who became a forum mole -- someone who hung around a forum long enough to gain reputation and trust in order to obtain linking privileges. I've only seen a few people do this and it was on forums with relatively low thresholds (usually ten posts or fewer).

Some people will build up their visibility in a community prior to rolling out a service that is relevant to that community's interests. How they announce the service once it goes live usually determines whether the announcement is tolerated.

On my own forums people drop by to announce products and services all the time. If they ask for permission in advance they have to explain to my admin team why our forum members should care about what they have to offer. I occasionally grant permission to post 1-time announcements that strike me as being both relevant and useful.

In most cases, people don't ask permission and we just delete their posts and ban their accounts. They never get a chance to inflate their posts.

One vendor, however, got permission from us to mostly post product announcements -- because we felt what he was selling was worthy of comment and discussion, and there have been occasional discussions that developed in his threads.

That's a little off topic but for the most part I think self-promotional people mistake forums for bulletin boards in supermarkets where they can pin up their business cards, brochures, and garage sale announcements.

A Web forum is more like the owner's private garden party and people should respect the forum enough not to crash it for their own self-interests.

[FirstTimePokerPlayer]

Actually, I wasn't really asking anything . I was just throwing in another motivation besides spamming links to produce low quality posts. Say I would desperately like to open some sort of thread in the market place as a new affiliate for reasons other than to 'promote your product' in a direct sense (which isn't unthinkable/unreasonable) and find out that I need 30 posts before I can do so. Now I go through the forum being the newb affiliate that I am but feel I have nothing else to contribute than only questions as there's no experience yet and so much to learn. Yet I would still like to be able to make that post in the mp, so 30 low quality posts it'll be then (or so people other than me might reason).

[Guerreiro]

Well spam is a hardcore diehard! I just will not go away completely, it is like a bacteria. Mods in Europe will help some i think, and I also have seen some posts that had as title sells sneakers, nokia etc. This was like a few weeks ago or something. I do not even notice it anymore, but i can imagine that it is hugely annoying as this forum is striving to be a topnotch quality forum. As for a solution, I got nothing much actually. I also run a forum but have not had spammers. Weird huh? And before anybody says it or thinks it, we cannot ban everyone who signs up that lives in India or China or Korea or any other country in Asia, or Eurasia for that matter.