Is AdSense fragmenting the Forum Community?

Competitive boards popping up like wildfire

[androidtech]

Even though AdSense has been around for quite some time now, it's only recently that the populace at large seems to have been really turned on to it. In the last month or so, the number of people signing up for my forum strictly to promote their competitive forum, has jumped astronomically.

In every instance the competitive board is running AdSense. Now I have *nothing* against boards running AdSense or advertising at all. It just seems that lately everyone and their cousin is setting up a forum, especially if the topic relates to popular consumer items, and then posting messages all around begging people to come to their forum; sometimes private messaging tons of users on other forums too.

Has anybody else seen this on their boards?

[Endurer]

Hello androidtech,

Yes I've encountered it quite a few times, I had to revise my forum policies to get rid of spam. Additionally I keep an eye on the number of private messages being sent at one time.

how about setting up a classifieds page? or a web directory?

[rogerd]

You can set up a forum in a few minutes, but the work required to turn it into a thriving community is tough to compensate with Adsense. Maybe if you have a five year plan...

I think 99% of the MFA forums will fail before they can get much traffic. Those that survive will do so because they have dedicated founders and, perhaps, not very good competing communities.

[androidtech]

I've followed the progress of several of these forums and none of them ever seem to do well so I agree with your assessment. Just more noise to the signal I guess.

[rogerd]

I think you are probably correct in stating that more forum startups are occurring because of the desire to earn Adsense revenue.

It's nothing like what's happening with blogs, though, where tens of thousands of MFA blogs are being spawned, some pure spam with scraped content, others "real" but with little purpose other than to serve ads.

[androidtech]

rogerd,

Yes, and then those splogs try to register on our forums to get link pop from Google!

[Endurer]

rel=nofollow works for me.

[viggen]

Has anybody else seen this on their boards?

Yup, thats why i use usergroups, meaning that a new member cant post a link.. (that sorts out about 95% of all spammer), and signature and avatars are on principle not shown to the engines...

regards
viggen

[openmind]

We also get about 2 to 5 new spam posts on our forum but that's because at this point our forum is open for anyone to post. It takes about 15 seconds to remove those messages, sometimes a little longer when the spammer even has created a user account. Interestingly enough 90% of those messages are in Russian.