Should We Have An Announcements Forum?

[Pony99CA]

We used to have an Announcements forum where companies could announce new products and other Web sites could announce various events. That disappeared a while back, so I reinstated it, but it seems to be gone again (although you can still access it here (http://discuss.pocketnow.com/forumdisplay.php?f=32)), so I thought I'd ask if people want an Announcements forum.

Vote in the poll to let us know.

Steve

[Brandon Miniman]

That forum got spammed heavily.

[Pony99CA]

That forum got spammed heavily.
I don't doubt it. However, the forum is still there and people are still posting to it. We've gotten a few relevant announcements there this year (7 in January, 3 so far in February), and no spam that I've seen.

As somebody who is often cleaning up the spam here, I haven't seen any more spam there than in the Pocket PC Forum (even though most users never see it because it's moderated, we still have to delete it) or the News & Bits forum (where people don't need to be registered to reply to threads).

For example, a couple of days ago, I cleaned at least 10 junk posts out of one News thread and more appeared. Fortunately, all of the posts were from three IP addresses, so I banned the IP addresses, but then spam started appearing there from another IP address (which I also banned). That's stopped the problem there (so far).

Also, just today, there was spam in 4-5 News threads (I cleaned out one thread, but somebody else cleaned out the others, so I didn't see the IP addresses and couldn't ban them) and spam from one Nigerian "electronics dealer" in the SnoopSoft Support forum and the Pocket PC Support forum.

Anyway, that's all to point out that I don't think the Announcements forum is a more likely target than existing forums. Many spammers don't even care if humans read their posts; they're trying to get higher search engine page rank. They'll also post the same junk to multiple forums at once, so having one less forum doesn't help that much.

Finally, I'm often preemptively deleting spammers (I look at new registrations 2-3 times per day and delete the obvious spammers), so that helps keep spam down.

I know that I enjoy seeing the announcements, and I bet others do, too.

Steve

[Wing Yew Lum]

woot! Brandon is right -- you will get spammed, but it can be a nice outlet for retailers and the community. Hope all has been well.

[Pony99CA]

Steve, Wing Yew from BoxWave here. Brandon is right -- you will get spammed, but it can be a nice outlet for retailers and the community.
There's still no spam there since my last post. One thing I've noticed is that spammers seem to post more in the first forum available, and I moved the Announcements forum out of the Support Center area (where I think it was the first forum) to the (currently invisible but still there) General Discussion area.

The first forum is now the Pocket PC forum in the Support Center area, which I think is why that gets most of the spam now. (And, as that's moderated, nobody ever sees it. Spammers don't pay attention to things like that. :))

As a test, I'm going to try making the Announcements forum visible again, and we'll see how that goes.

Steve