Forum Moderators: rogerd
But there are probably major drawbacks, (unless what i guess every community would be doing it)
- Server and banwidth cost : tecnically, is it intensive?
- May be spammers, or people doing illegal things?
Any experience reports or thoughts about this?
Thank you for your 5 cents, or more. :)
My biggest worry would be that spammers would take advantage of it and get the whole domain blacklisted.
That's kind of what I had in mind. No spammer will go through the effort to built up a significant post count just to get an email address. Plus, as emodo notes, there's an incentive to participate. If you ever add a fee-based "supporters" section, that would be a logical benefit.
I'd still build in controls, though. Good members can go bad, accounts can get hijacked, etc. Be sure your domain has an abuse report contact listed on the site, too.
Ok for the spam issue, that can be solved as suggested : limiting the service to community members with an established history based on post count, or quality of posting + setting some limits on the number of emails sent in 24 hours + eventually restrict max number of recipients.
I tested some mail server soft that allows admin to play god, including these options.
And also a human monitoring of which user sent what/when/to who, trough detailled stats time and user based. Very usefull to do fine tuning and bust THE bad user not detected by the system.
So, now there are only numbers to be found for each of these restrictions. :)
About how hard has to be membership restriction, i think it depends what the admin hope to get from the feature. Is it an incentive for few happy people, or rather a big number game?
will the post count limit be like 100 or 5000? Or 3000 + manual approval depending on quality of posting.
Personaly, in the context of my community, i have the big number approach.
It is like a stickers pack from your favorite brand. They are not going to sponsor you, They don't look if you fit well.
You like it, so just wear it and stick'em!
(Agressive? Definitely!)
If i just wanted to offer it to very involved posters from my board, i probably would have copped manually using vqadmin.
BTW, i would never give a member a mail @ my domain, no matter how huge he can be.
I ve been an admin long enough to know...that you never know virtual people. Specially those who get close to you. I 'd never give them a power that i can't control.
Instead i'd give them an adress @ a domain name close to mine (same meaning, attitude, cool) but only dedicated to mail.
The next question is the viral thing.
I think adding your footer to any of their email messages, like yahoo does, can be a powerfull way to increase your traffic, as long as your footer text is good. People from my community know people that would be truely interrested joining us. I'm i wrong? What do you think?
The next issue i see, and probably the main, is costs and gains. But i'd probably rather open a dedicated topic in a more appropriate section.
