Deleting All SubForums...

Mark, you hit the nail on the head. Everything is, to a degree, interrelated. Nothing in IM works in a vacuum, which is why one little thing going wrong can torpedo your business. I'm living proof of that.

I don't know what the answer is to combat the spam problem other than to put restrictions on initial posts. There have been some excellent suggestions as to how to do this in the main forum. At least I thought they were excellent suggestions.

Ultimately, I think ownership wants to make it as easy as possible for members to sign up and start participating. Any hindrances and that means less traffic and that's not good for business. And when you've sunk as much money into this place as they have, what's bad for business isn't acceptable.

Ironically, I believe that the spam problem itself is bad for business in that it will eventually drive people away if it hasn't already. From what I hear, traffic at the WF is down. I have not personally verified this but that's what I hear.

Again, I don't have an answer. I'm nowhere near smart enough to come up with a solution for such a complex problem. But I don't think removing all the sub forums with the exception of the OT and WSO forum and maybe a few other specialty forums (classified, JVs, etc.) is the answer. I think that's just going to turn the main forum into a junkyard.

Not that it doesn't already look like one anyway.

Dennis,

It would cause another problem that might be as bad.

Putting those all into one section would break up a lot of very tightly knit groups that know each other and work well together. Maintaining those bonds in a section as chaotic as a catchall forum would become would be nearly impossible.

On top of that, it would introduce the problem of random newbies interjecting nonsense posts into the threads, which isn't nearly as big an issue in the sub-forums as in main discussion. So, threads that currently tend to be higher value conversations would be devalued by the added "noise."

The probable result would be splinter forums, to which those groups would migrate.

As a rule, these tend to be the most experienced and active contributors. Not the folks the new management really wants to chase out, I suspect.

I don't honestly think it would make it easier to find the spam, anyway. In the sub-forums with mods, the problem is pretty manageable, and the "local" members talk to each other. On top of that, the mods learn the patterns that can be specific to their sections, but might not be so obvious to a forum-wide mod.

I'd wager, for example, that SEO subject lines that scream "SPAM!" to Mike and Yukon wouldn't even get noticed by most of the other mods. Bury those in the flood of an everything goes main discussion, and you do two big things: You probably lose the experienced help of the gentlemen who currently handle spam in the SEO discussions and you make it less likely the other mods will catch it.

The only spam that would get caught quickly is the super-obvious stuff, like that idiot "astrology" spammer or the fashion stuff. That's getting nailed pretty quickly as it is, so I'm not seeing any real potential benefit spam-wise at all.

The current layout of sub-forums isn't ideal, but it beats the alternatives I've seen proposed.


Paul