There is no such thing as forum spam
Posted by: Marketing Guy Date posted: February 13th, 2008 Published in: Humour, SpamOK this is a very old conversation that I had with someone on a forum of mine. After the thread was “finished”, I locked it and stuck it into a temp hidden forum where I archived stuff I don’t want to be public. Just stumbled across it today and thought I’d post it here for a laugh. 
The guy started the thread because I had deleted one of his spam posts (link drop for his business – not pure SEO-keyword-spam but spam all the same). It eventually leads to the revealation – THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FORUM SPAMMING! OMG!
The guy said,
Scott,
I am surprised that anyone posts on your forum at all. I mean with all your RULES and STIPULATIONS you sound like everyone’s DADDY. Dude, I was looking forward to posting here and adding some really good content for everyone else but MY GOD! Even the RULES regarding this thread in my professional opinion is going way too far man, come on it’s just a damn forum for god sakes… How insulting and degrading.
You say you will moderate this thread HEAVILY. Where do you find the time? MLM schemes? Work from home schemes? I MUST correct you as I know MANY people who have made fortunes in networking and work from home businesses ME being one of those people. I even own a few forums but NEVER do OVER Moderate them. I refuse to post here anymore. I just thought I’d let you know this before you Destroy your forum dude.
I responded with,
Thanks for the comments. Forum has been running just fine for quite some time now.
There are plenty of methods of promoting businesses and this isn’t one of them. This forum is here for job hunters to receive advice. Not for businesses to make more money.
I’m more than happy for recruiters and employers or other businesses to promote their services in the commerical forum or in their signature, but blatant spam posts detract from the overall quality of the forum.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect those who profit from promoting their businesses here to in return contribute something back to the users. It’s a process of giving and taking – users get advice and information, businesses get exposure and credibility for offering it.
If you don’t want to post here, that’s absolutely fine. I don’t think the recruitment industry will crumble as a result.
Clearly getting angry now, he comes back with:
Scott,
Please, when you use the word SPAM use it correctly and in it’s correct definition. . .
SPAM is unsolicited E mail.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING as SPAMMING a forum.
There is a such thing as running a tyrannical despotic forum where the moderator picks and chooses what type of content the readers are ALLOWED to see. I personally DO NOT believe that is how to run a REAL forum.
Scott,
I originally posted under a thread here specifically designed to have jobs posted on it. YOU deleted my thread because I simply wanted to tell your readers about a FREE jobsite, that is the purpose of this forum isn’t it? To help members find Jobs??? Or is it just informaton YOU deem appropriate…?
Anyway you look at it you’re NOT giving your members FREE reign to post what they want, therefore it is your members that get cheated out of something that may help them. Do you understand my point? I am partner to several succesful job sites niche and mainstream and now I decided to give valuable content elsewhere.
YOU lose and your members LOSE all because of OVERMODERATION.
Now I’m getting slightly annoyed – this guy thinks that somehow he has a right to promote his job board on my forums (which BTW, was an out of the box job board CMS with no data)…
Go to any web design or SEO forum and tell them there is no such thing as forum spamming and they will laugh you off the boards. “Spam” hasn’t been limited to email for a long time and has always refered to unwanted, tacky, inappropriate solicitons – the medium by which they are delviered is not the issue.
Your free jobsite that helps jobseekers had like 5 jobs on it and 4 employers.
It is this kind of bias, self promoting SPAM that is of ZERO use to the real members of this board. That is the kind of selfish, single minded mentality that I don’t want on these forums – because it is of ZERO use to the REAL users of this forum.
You came here to promote your your job board and the first things you did were to complete disregard the board rules which you had clearly read, then went ahead and personally attack the forum owner and operations.
Well let me put this is no uncertain terms for you.
You job board sucks. It is of zero use to anyone – no jobs on it, no CVs on it for employers. Frankly it looks like it’s a fresh install of a shop in a box.
Your marketing strategy sucks. Your sales-esque posts trying to get people to go to your empty job board were transparent and amateurish. That’s not a big deal because good sales copy is hard to write. But it was compounded by your arrogant presumption that you could come here and dictate policy just because it doesn’t suit your desire for free advertising.
The irony is that had you any common sense whatsoever, you could have simply followed the not unreasonable rules and got your free advertising.
What I think is you are a one man band web designer / SEO, probably working from home. You setup a few websites, joined a few affiliate schemes, whatever and decided to setup a job board because the job board business model is low maintenance and easy to create.
Yet_another job board is of ZERO use to jobseekers – the market is already heavily saturated and the search technology behind 99% of job boards is fundamentally flawed.
The single reason more job boards keep popping up is that they are relatively easy to create and maintain.
Please don’t post here again.
Scott
I got bored and banned the guy after this.
What a stupid approach to marketing a site. The guy actually believed that he had a right to promote his business on a public forum without any thought about the forum rules.
Self promotion on forums isn’t a bad thing – many of my moderators work in the same field as do many of my regular users – that’s just part of running a community. But marketing your business in this way needs to be a more subtle activity – forcing your business on communities when you are an unknown is just plain silly.
I wonder if the guy works for Jobsite now?
Anyone have an amusing spammer story to share?
Scott
Comments
LOL I think I remember that one, was it JSA related?
The world is full of muppets. I work on the basis that for every bit of spam I get email, forum or otherwise that the ratio is 300:1 spam to legit or interesting.
I did a post on a tenders section of a business site offering legitimate members (post counts 100+) free space/advertising within a business I run, it’s pretty specialist so I did not expect much of a response. The only response so far is some tosser who registered on the forum, has made no posts and wants us to buy his shitty product… Beyond belief I can’t decide if I should out his naff company?
BTW. Like the new look!!!
Yeh it is.
The problem with some forum spam is that it is beginning to become a little more subtle. I’ve noticed an increase in fairly innocent posts that are made so the spambot can edit the post a few months down the line and drop a link without admin noticing it. I must come across as the most unwelcoming forum admin ever because I tend to delete anything I think is spam or could be spam!
The annoying stuff is people spamming services that blatantly rip people off – I’ve seen a lot of spam aimed at small businesses which make wild claims (usually centred around Google rankings). I have (successfully)raised some issues with Trading Standards before and that usually helps.
Well, this amusing situation reminds me of Nature’s tactics: In order to spread their seeds more effectively, trees make tasty fruits. So tomorrow’s spammers are likely to make tasty comments, too (to drop the seeds of their links).
Actually, I am commenting here for another reason, not spamming itself. It looks like (although the situation you describe is pretty clear and well-known)… Spammers and spamming tend to obscure other serious problems, that are much more important. E.g. a friend of mine, moderator for a number of years in a very decent forum (about plants and ecology) told me that the whole forum was literally SOLD, to a company nobody has a clue about. That forum’s posters and moderators had done a very nice job, dilligently working paylessly to produce worthwhile reading material in their field of interest. The only thing they enjoyed as a reward is freedom of expression and information among them. Now the forum was bought; all the dissident voices were shut down (e.g. anyone speaking positively of businesses the new owners regards as their competitor), and so on.
Spammers are not THE problem. Lack of openness and true freedom of expression, in many cases IS, THE problem – i think.
Best regards, I’ ve added you to my blog-roll. Keep the good work goind.
Hi Omadeon, thanks for the kind words!
You bring up an excellent point which I think applies to other areas of the web as well – businesses buying into the “wrong concept” and end up messing things up. I’ve seen a few gaming communities literally revolt against the forum admin because they added unsavoury advertising to the forum! In that case, the community split into groups, some staying with the forum and others leaving to setup their own competing forum. Actually thinking about it, I’ve seen similar things happen in SEO communities over the years as well.
That said, if you look at gaming forums as an extreme example – lack of openess and freedom of expression are far from being the problem – in fact, if anything the members are TOO open and express themselves TOO much – to the point that 30 year old men seen to devolve into a something between a virtual version of Lord of the Flies and a Clockwork Orange.
So based on that I would say that to a good extent we have a reasonable ability to express out opinions but as a (virtual) society, many communities still lack the maturity and responsiblity to exercise that right appropriately.
That said, it was immensely stupid for the company you mention to start trying to silence people – they clearly bought the forum over with no idea or experience of how to run a community like that. It was just a dumbass marketing decision that ended up going sour. IMO, your friend would be better off starting his own competing forum and inviting as many members to join him as he can! If you can get even a small group of regular posters to go with you that’s the hardest part of setting up and establishing a forum accomplished.
Cheers for th interesting comments!
Scott
Does anyone how to unlock this phone. if yes what does one use it to unlock it. Thanks