Brett_Tabke - 5:59 pm on May 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

How can we tweak the moderation policy to allow more links - less editing - and more random user satisfaction?

How would you adjust it to fix these cases:

- competitors asking "what's wrong with this page" when they are really pointing out spam so that Matt Cutts will see it?
- people asking about "can I do X on this page" when they sell products to webmasters?
- what do you think of product x? And product X is usually a SEO tool or WebHosting or... we've had people name drop 200-300 times in the forums in whisper campaigns.
- what do we do with competitors that encourage staff to come promote at webmaster world?
- what do we do with professional forum spammers?
- what about people who come in and drop links to great stories, but do it once a day? Lets say Rand were to stop in and let people know about the latest blog post on SEOMoz? (no, he never would do that, but others have and continue to do so)
- What about moderators from competing forums that come in and share "info" links in line?
- What about this one? [webmasterworld.com...] is Major_Payne the author of that, or just referencing it? What about sites that monitor keywords and want jump all over threads and reference.

If done professionally, you won't even realize that a spammer has been in the forums.

Pleaes read the background posts (we think about this stuff alot):
pro forum spammers: [webmasterworld.com...]
community discussion on blog links: [webmasterworld.com...]


So, with that as a background, how can we update the TOS in such away that a) the members can understand it, b) the mods can get behind it, and c) it holds up to the smell test.

eg: how do we stay webmasterworld and not become any number of the spammed out forums out there. I think we all know there are alot of forums out there and some are pretty low quality.