'Unimportant forums' and isolating the forums from the rest

nickwill

Gavin Weeks wrote:
And again as I said before people are failing to see beyond the forums, its 3% of the entire Bikeradar site, by what people are saying and the amount of complaints we are getting I would think it was the only thing on here.

If the forums are so unimportant, why couldn't they be left alone? :evil:

If all links to outside sites are blocked, it cuts the forums off from the rest of the web.
I've picked up and passed on a lot of information over the years via the C+ site. It would be a big own goal to make this impossible! :evil:

I'm sure I'm being seen as a negative poster on this forum, but I've never been negative before all these changes happened!

Big Red S

Nickwill wrote:

If all links to outside sites are blocked, it cuts the forums off from the rest of the web.

They're not.

After spamming this forum with links to them, links to some forums are cut off/censored. As we would do with any link going anywhere if someone were to spam the forum with it.
If you remove the point of the spamming, it's more likely to cease.

Gavin does seem to have spectacularly underestimated the importance of the forums to a huge proportion of their users, though.

DirtJumper3200

Yes there are certian places they don't want you to join.

There are a few reasons for this:

They might only think of themselves
They might be scared of the competition
They might think the other forums can't get around this

I don't know but it sure is pathetic.

Big Red S

DirtJumper3200 wrote:

Basicly they don't want you guys changing to UK MB.

http:// UK MB .org.uk

No. We have nothing against it. Some of us post there, too.

What we have issues with, as has been explained before, is spamming the forum with links. That's why we now delete all links that could conceivably be the start of you spamming again.
Like I say, I have better, more interesting, things to be doing than deleting hundreds of identical posts. So, in order to stop myself having to spend another evening doing that, I try to nip spam in the bud. Sure, I probably get a lot of false positives, but that's preferable to false negatives in my eyes. The same goes for the rest of the mods, I would imagine.

DirtJumper3200

Avi, If the admins would actually speak to us when we've tried to get names/email addresses they would be off our site too.

But the admins don't seem to want to talk when we only want to stop it too.

Big Red S

DirtJumper3200 wrote:

Avi, If the admins would actually speak to us when we've tried to get names/email addresses they would be off our site too.

Well, you know fleabag has spammed the site, and I thought you'd seen Dogtanian wandering round comparing everything to questionable twentieth century governments.
The former would certainly have been banned on MBUK, the latter left until it was no longer entertaining.
The only reason I've done nothing to ban them is because all it'll lead to is yet more comparisons with hitler, and I'm quite bored of them.

Ravenbait

Can I just check the definition of "spam" being used here?

I was under the apprehension that "spam" constitued posts with the primary purpose of selling something - i.e. commerical or promotional posts.

Sam

Big Red S

Ravenbait wrote:

Can I just check the definition of "spam" being used here?

I was under the apprehension that "spam" constitued posts with the primary purpose of selling something - i.e. commerical or promotional posts.

Spam usually describes unsolicited and unwanted mail. On forums, it's usually used to describe an awful lot of near-identical posts that are advertising something.