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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
And that, of course, is the problem: If you put up a new subforum, the old forums will continue to get the same posts they get now... plus they'll be added to the new forum. Because spammers aren't going to pay attention to MR's largely voluntary guidelines... they'll spam. That's what they do. |
We're looking at two different issues, I think. The true spammers (that video editing software company, for instance) will spam no matter
what we do. As you say, that's what they do. The only way to stop
them is various administrative measures (account verification, even IP filtering if it comes to that) and zealous mods jumping on their posts. That's a problem on any forum, anywhere, on any topic, and forum admins entertain themselves by devising suitably vile punishments in the afterlife for the people who do it.
But we also have the issue of people who are not spammers -- at least, not in the same sense. True, some of them may just drop off book announcements here and nothing else, but even they're valuable to us. We are, after all, a bunch of people whose common interest is ebooks, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who bought an ebook reader because my pbook collection was threatening the structural stability of my floor. Those people -- for instance, the person whose post on the "Introduce Yourself" board was 98% ad for his book -- don't think they're spammers, and they don't want to be spammers (at least we hope they don't!); they just want to tell us about their new ebook.
So if they had a clearly marked board for telling us about new ebooks -- like my Book Fair idea -- I think the overwhelming majority of them would say "Oh, that's where my announcement belongs" and post accordingly. The ones who don't could be dealt with on an individual basis by the mods. It's been my experience as a mod and admin, going back to the dial-up BBS days, that the way to get users to go where you want is to pull them, not push them. That's why practically every forum has something like the Lounge. Telling people "don't post off-topic stuff on the forums" leads to constant problems, bickering, and hard feelings; telling them "post your off-topic stuff in the Lounge" gets almost all of it posted right where it belongs (YFMV). Mods, how often do you have to move something to the Lounge? Not often, right, even though it's kind of hard to find?
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The only thing that will keep the other posts out will be manual monitoring and indiscriminate post removal on the part of the mods... and no one wants to have to do that.
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If they have the option, most people actually do want to be good forum citizens. Even the post-and-run authors that we never see except when they've got something to sell, they still don't want to tick us off. The DVD software guys hit every forum on the Web; they don't care if they annoy most of them, they'll still get a response from thousands of others. There are only a relative handful of places like MobileRead, though, and most people are smart enough not to get their target market really, really steamed at them -- especially since MR is large enough and ranks highly enough on Google to have a fair bit of influence on opinions. So if they have an "announce your book in the MR Book Fair" option, I think nearly all of them will take it, and the handful who don't can be educated, and their posts moved, on a case-by-case basis.
As for post removal, it would be very discriminating post removal, and that's what mods are for. *grins, ducks, and runs*