Brett_Tabke - 8:31 pm on Jun 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

The WebmasterWorld Google forum is the largest single discussion subforum on the internet today. This subboard sees more page views and unique visitors in a day than all other Google forums, blogs, news sites, and email lists on the internet combined.

That knowledge and $2.85USD will still get you a cup of coffee and a wireless connection at most Starbucks in the US today ;-)

In alot of ways, we have become a victim of our success. There just wasn't time to get through all of the postings. After update Dominic last month -- where over 5000 messages were left -- we had to do something to increase the quality.

The problem is that the update threads were gateway threads for new members. That was their only experience of webmasterworld. Those threads were in the chat or irc style chit-chat format. The quality was simply not up to par with WebmasterWorld history. That style of low quality posting has invaded WebmasterWorld top-to-bottom.

Members were not pleased with the lowered quality standards here in the Google forum, or elsewhere on the site. Critical comment after critical comment streamed in about the Google forum for several months. It was clear that something had to be done that didn't require a mass army of moderators to handle. All that happened in the foreground, while in the background management stress escalated. Time spent dealing with problems in the Google forum went from a few a week in 2002, to several dozen per day by May 03.

Pre-Moderating the Google Forum

So, last month we took the radical step of testing premoderation in the Google Forum. Under premoderation, all new discussions will have to be moderator approved.

So far, most feedback has been very positive. There are occasional problems with the new system, but far less than the old one. Lets go through some of the reasons for the new system that point out problems with the old system:

1) Duplicate Content.
One of the hot Google Webmaster topics for the last six months has been duplicate content. We have a form of the same here, in that we get so many duplicate topic postings. It was not uncommon to see the same topic posted 5-10 times in a few days. By moving to premoderation, we are able to weed those duplicates out at the front door before they become a problem.

2) Privacy issues, promotional issues, and posts against the forum charter.
The most repetitive issue here is the dropping of promotional urls and/or keyword searches.

3) Raves, Rants, Flames, Trolls, JuJu Beans.

4) Bad thread titles.
As a optimizer, potential optimizer, or weekend webmaster, it is your mission to learn how to write a quality thread/page titles [useit.com].
We've discussed it and harped about quality titles for three years. No longer. There is a ton of quality info on the site and out on the net related to titles. Use Google to find those pages.

We are all adults here and responsible for our own learning. I've told the moderators to not even read a post if it has a poor title.

Titles must reflect the content of the post.

The biggest problem with thread titles is that people tend to feel the need to comment

Recent examples (last 4 hours):

"Puzzle me this"
"What am I doing wrong?"

Both were not approved because of low quality titles. (you expect us to do better and hold us to a higher standard - catch-22 - we expect you to do better too).

5) Personal issues with Google.
Those that fall here are the large numbers of "I've been banned" or "I got a #1 ranking" type posts that include very specific info about a site.

6) Off topic.
Messages that go off topic to the original post will be deleted. It is up to each posters to see that they stay within the confines of the original message.