When Is It Spam? Intent Is The Issue Here

Okay, there are really two issues here.

Let's take them one at a time.

Issue number one is the actual law, regulation, TOS or whatever you want to
call it. There are very specific "rules", if you will, about spam. If it can be
proven that a post, profile or whatever, was done with the specific intent
to spam the site, then it is quite possible that there can be consequences.
I for one would not want to take my chances IF I knew I was doing
something that I probably shouldn't be doing.

Issue number two is intent. This is a tough one to define. So to try to make
it more clear and to also show how difficult it is to prove intent, let's use
the WF as an example.

Let's take 3 scenarios.

1. Member comes to forum with no intent to spam and makes nothing but
useful posts. May or may not have signature. He found forum on his own.

2. Member comes to forum only with intent to spam and makes nothing
but nonsense one line posts. Has signature pointing to his site. He was
told to go to forum by one of those books that teaches you to make
money by going to forums. This particular book doesn't make any mention
of contributing useful info...just making posts to get your sig seen.

3. Member comes to forum with intent to "monetize" it. Makes useful posts,
contributes to forum but does have a signature for the specific purpose
of getting people to buy from him. He was also sent by a book but this
one points out the proper way to use a forum, by contributing relevant
info.

Okay, member 1 is an obvious "I'm just here to contribute" as there is
nothing that he is selling.

Member 2 is also obvious as he is making nothing but meaningless posts
to get his sig seen.

Member 1 will be allowed to stay and member 2 will probably be booted
off the forum rather quickly.

The gray area comes in with member 3, which becomes compounded if
that book reaches hundreds of people.

Suddenly, the WF is inundated with new members almost overnight at a
very alarming rate. It is obvious that somebody wrote a book saying, "Go
to the WF and start posting."

But wait, all these people, or at least most of them, are actually
contributing. Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that how the forum grows and
ultimately, isn't that what the forum owner wants?

The problem is, this is a Utopian example and in the real world, it doesn't
exist.

Out of, say, 500 people, maybe only 400 of them will contribute even
though the book says not to spam. What happens is you have a swarm
of people who make life miserable for the forum owner.

Now we have a problem.

And this is where I understand where people who complain about spam
are coming from.

Suddenly you have this site which is being overrun by people who are
contributing nothing to the site other than to spam it.

What are you to do?

Well, while I agree that complaining to the FTC or whoever is probably
not going to get you anywhere, I do see the person's frustration and I
would feel the same way.

However, what I would do is simple, and it's what I've done with my own
blogs. I don't allow comments on them at all. Now, if I'm running a forum,
I realize I have a more complex problem. If I disallow signatures, I may
lose a lot of members. But I also don't want to spend all day deleting
accounts.

It's not an easy position to be in and before you judge the person
making the complaints, try to put yourself in his shoes.

This of course brings up an even bigger issue of...

"When is it legit and when are we spamming?"

In the case of submitting articles to Ezine Articles, there is no problem
there as EZA has to approve each article. If you write a crap article, or
it's obvious you're just trying to get backlinks, your article will be denied.
You're going to have to actually write something that contributes to the
directory. So the process itself weeds out the spammers.

But what about the directories that have no approval process? They are
very easy to abuse. They also have lousy PRs, for the most part, so
aren't much use to the writer anyway.

Ultimately, the site owner has to decide what he's going to do with his
site. If he doesn't like the new method that's being taught, to go to his
site and create a profile with a backlink, then simply don't allow links in
the profile...problem solved.

Will this cut down on members? Probably, but if they're not contributing
anything useful anyway, what is he actually losing? Nothing.

Before we go around throwing stones, we need to take a look at our own
houses and be honest about how we would react if the same thing
happened to us.

I am interested in how other marketers view this issues since, after all,
most of us do leverage other sites to get traffic to ours.

How would you feel if somebody leveraged your site to get traffic to
theirs and contributed nothing of value in the process?

It's, at the very least, something to think about.