Returning Sitepoint to it's Former Glory

Community
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Hey Sitepointians!

Well I’m back and contributing what I can to this great forum, however, it pains me to say that some aspects of the forums aren’t what they used to be back in 2003-2006 when I was last a regular visitor.
Don’t get me wrong, there are many here contributing what they can and that is 100% fantastic and you should keep it up. Most of you know who you are already.
But I’ve been roaming the forums constantly for about 2 weeks now and have made 1 or 2 observations, some of which I’m sure people are already aware of.

  1. The amount of spammers

Sitepoint I’m sure would have to be one of the top forums for spammers to head too so they can try and earn some traffic to their sites. This means there are a lot of one-post users with links that need to be reported and threads that have been created without any real purpose or definition.

  1. The amount of fluff - There seems to me that there is a lot of fluff around sitepoint that just isn’t necessary. General Chat I can understand, fluff is a big piece of General Chat and I for one enjoy it from time to time. But there appears to be a significant amount of posts in the rest of the forum that seems a stretch at a real contribution. It’s often users with the post number of less than 50 in which this occurs, often from users who have 2-10 posts (from the threads I’ve been in anyway). Is this the effect of the fact that people need a certain amount of posts to update their avatars and titles?

Now I know we all have to start somewhere, but the paranoia in me suggests that most new users (the ones that post fluffy kind of posts) just aren’t making this great forum what it could be. Again, the usual contributors are as always, being very helpful. Posting replies even to those who can hardly string a sentence together and only have 1-10 posts, which is a credit to how good the users on this forum are.

Is there a system in place of users with less than say 25 posts being deleted after a certain amount of time? I think the 90 day policy for signatures is very generous for example. People can sign up without making a post then come back 90 days later and fluff General Chat with their signatures?

I guess I’m not sure where this is headed. I just wanted to voice some of my concerns and would love to hear some feedback of what kind of systems are in place to improve the forums.

Thanks and keep up the good work.

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Hi bo5ton, and thanks for your thoughts. These issues are always being discussed amongst the staff, and various things are being tried. The fluff is annoying, but there are various reasons for it (sometimes a language barrier) so we don’t want to be too heavy-handed. It’s not too hard just to pass over fluffy posts, but however many you see here, there are hundreds of spam accounts and fluff posts that we delete every day. There are some forums that attract little else but fluff, and we are considering what to do about those. Stay tuned. :slight_smile:

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Cool, Thanks @ralph_m. Good to know you’re onto it.
I’d love to know if there’s anything we as forum members can do.
Perhaps a voting system.
Or an initiation.
Like a “real” user must submit a photo of a shoe on their head holding a sitepoint sign… :stuck_out_tongue:

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There’s a thread for that already - here

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Apart from what’s in the thread @Max Height; linked to (thanks for that!) if you see any spam, fluff etc., please hit the report button (orange flag, bottom left of a post) and tell us about it. Keeping the forums clean really depends on support of all members, as the forums are too big for just a few people to monitor. :slight_smile:

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Ok, I’ll do whatever I can to help, however this seems to me like a reactive measurement to fluff and spam rather than a preventative measurement. Having said that, I’m not sure how you could really tackle the whole process. I will keep an eye on that thread and I will make suggestions where applicable.

However, one thing I believe in is ignorance. I think regular posters in the forum should know better, and we should also be flagging those regulars who respond to fluff/spam posters just for pips sake.