Forum Rules, User Groups, and Promotions

[Chris]

FORUM RULES

No spam, no flaming, be respectful.

SPAM - Spam is any self promotion or solicitation posted outside of the marketplace subforum, or posted inside the marketplace subforum but not at all related to website publishing (ie, viagra spam is always spam no matter where it is posted). Generally, if your first post is spam, you'll get banned for it. If you've been a member for awhile but just slipped up, you get a warning.

SIGNATURES & PMs
You may promote anything in your signature, except affiliate/referral links. Link to your sites all you want, don't just put in a bunch of affiliate/referral links.

Spam also applies to PMs, if I find out that you've been sending mass PMs to people asking them to do something, you get in trouble.

Registered members get 4 lines for their signatures & 300 stored PMs
Senior Registered Members get 5 lines for their signatures & 500 stored PMs
Forum or Site Contributors get 6 lines for their signatures & 800 stored PMs

USER GROUPS

You become at Senior Registered Member at 500 posts.
Once you become a Senior Registered Member you may pay a fee to become a Forum Contributor. In addition to bonuses such as denying private message receipts, seeing invisible users, and the larger PM & signature space (bigger avatar too). Being a contributor allows you to apply for access to the Publisher's Club. An exclusive private discussion forum for more sensitive information people do not want shared publicly. More on applying will be provided once you reach that level.

People who write articles for the site are Site Contributors, who get to the level of Forum Contributor for free.

For lists of the usergroups, please see here (http://www.websitepublisher.net/forums/showgroups.php).

[Mike]

Have you changed the private message quota? I get a message saying I've got a limit of 200 messages?

[Chris]

You're special since you're in a different usergroup. I'll fix it.

[Mike]

Special, heh. Yeah, there's more room now. Cheers...

[KLB]

Wow these are another set of great changes. Chris you are really working on evolving this site. :)

I like what you are doing.

[FPU]

Kind of a sad thing I notice that I have not seen discussed is the major problem I had with other forums when I started posting here, when logged out Signatures are not shown for my account, but when logged in they show.

I can tell you that really sucks and was the basis for me attacking many forum owners in the last few years on the forum circuit.

Please explain this Chris so we can understand why you are doing this!

[KLB]

Anthony, I'm not sure what your are asking Chris as I just checked this forum via Opera so that I wasn't logged in and I saw sigs just fine.

Personally I think it is the right of each forum owner as to whether they show public sigs or not. Personally speaking I'm a member of lots and lots of forums, but focus much less attention on those forums that do not show public sigs unless they are REALLY good forums.

[rpanella]

I see everyones sigs as well when I logout. Perhaps the post you looked at you did not include your signature?

I would look into it a little more next time before calling Chris out on it.
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[agua]

Isn't it a setting under options - Thread Display Options - Show Signatures - on/off?

[rpanella]

Isn't it a setting under options - Thread Display Options - Show Signatures - on/off?

That is an option but FPU was talking about them being disabled to non-logged in visitors, so that Googlebot etc would not see the links and therefore not pass any PR or anything.
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[agua]

Ah ok - I understand, and just tested being logged out and I could see the signatures - so maybe I don't understand :)

[rpanella]

Exactly, the signatures do show up as Ken and myself both pointed out to FPU.
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[Chris]

Yup I haven't changed that, nor do I plan on changing it. Must be a problem at your end.

[FPU]

It is happening on this thread (http://www.websitepublisher.net/forums/showthread.php?t=4830), when logged in I see my signature, but when logging out it disappears, I can see see KLB's either way though, I have not noticed it with any other threads yet.

[FPU]

I see everyones sigs as well when I logout. Perhaps the post you looked at you did not include your signature?

I would look into it a little more next time before calling Chris out on it.

This may be the case, but why would the signature show back up if it was not included when the post was made when I log in?

[KLB]

I don't see your sig in that thread either way. My bet is that your sig was turned off (or you didn't have a sig) when you made those posts for some odd reason. This isn't something that can be easily changed after the post has been made.

I wouldn't worry about it, nor do I think it was anything intentional on Chris' part.

[FPU]

I don't know why it would show up when I'm logged in Ken ?

I just thought Chris might have made sig's showing up to guest view part of the new benefit for senior user groups is all man.

This is still a major issue, I see Sitepoint traffic going down recently for this very reason, people are not interested in contributing there anymore for nothing!

I see their Marketplace becoming a major flop in the end because of it too!

[KLB]

I do not know why you are seeing sigs for those posts when you are logged in when none of the rest of us are seeing them when we are logged in. Regardless if you aren't seeing the issue on other posts you have made (like in this thread) then it isn't a systemic problem and should be just ignored as a "gee that's kind of odd, but oh well" type of thing.

To be frank, you can not point to the sig issue and say it is the primary cause of a site's decline in traffic. Correlation does not equal causation. IF Sitepoint's traffic is dropping it could be caused by many factors with sigs only being a minor factor.

[FPU]

I think I have figured out why I'm seeing this Ken, since I have my options set to show the latest posts at the top, when I log out it switches the order around and when I started that thread I did not have a signature.

So it is showing a different order when logged in versus logged out.

PS: I have been watching Sitepoint's traffic, and it is going down due to many factors, one being lack of signatures and fees for the marketplace when webmasters have free marketplaces available. Why should they waste time posting there if everything is pay to play?

[KLB]

Anthony, I'm glad you figured out your sig issue. :)

In regards to SP's traffic I'd bet that the marketplace fees are the #1 reason for any traffic declines they are seeing. This may in fact be a desired side effect from SP's standpoint. Sometimes, too much traffic is well, too much. The fees help increase revenues and help decrease traffic, which decreases bandwidth expenses.

[ethan0904]

Hello i am new to all this and dont want to get banned for spamming !

Is ths allowed ?
Can i ask people to look at my site and give me feed back and ideas at all ?

And if anyone does look at it please bear in mind that i am completely new to website design (if thats what you can call it) so go gently.

[petershene]

Hi guys i dont know where else to place this , so feel free to move it as you want , i came from a forum that used to be quite strict , if you posts didnt add any value or where simple questions that could be googled , it was considered spam and you were warned. With regards to the questions policy they dropped it , so everyone was free to ask questions as they pleased , however soon we had a massive influx of what is css, explain web design , what is wordpress and so goes the list.

Basically on that forum that spam rating went up and the established members stopped bothering and now its reduced to a playground for free signature links and whatever else you want. I see this happening on many forums , i hope you can see my point in this. I know i have not said much but that is what ive been taught about forums dont ask unless you've tried googling it and cannot find the answer , dont speak if you arent adding something new to the op's request.

I hope you guys see what im saying.

I hate seeing forums die they are so valuable in members that know what you need to learn about. unlike social media.