Forum Software Upgrade and Signature Policy Change

[intelliot]

Hi GCers,

I've upgraded to the latest version of our forum software. It has a huge number of new features, including:

• Thread Tagging
• Reciprocal Friendships Between Users: This turns GC into a complete social network, where you can create mutual friendships with other members here.
• Public Messaging: Communicate directly on others' profile pages!
• User Picture Galleries: Create albums and upload pictures to your account. You can limit visibility to just people on your buddy list (for privacy).
• User-Created Social Groups: Create social/interest groups. For example: California Google Fans!
• Social Bookmarking: You can easily add threads to various social bookmarking websites.
• Visitor Tracking on Profile Pages: See who's been to your Profile.
• Automatic Image Resizing
• Forum Custom Icons: I'll be asking for your help in putting these together soon.
• Social Groups: Each group has its own messages, which works the same way as Public Messaging for individual users (which is also new!)
• Profile Customization? When I learn more about this feature, I may enable it.

Let me know if you notice any bugs

Signature Policy Change

I'm really excited about our Community's fast growth, and I want to ensure that we maintain a high level of post quality.

I've noticed that many low-quality posts have lengthy signatures attached, usually with multiple spammy links (which aren't related to Google in any way), such as:

• Hot stars
• Bad credit loans
• Cheap/discount pharmacy
• Pain relief
• Luxury watches
• Soma/health/cialis/ultram
• Real estate
• Shopping/sales

To eliminate this problem, I am disabling signatures for all regular users, effective immediately.

I understand that many users post here to promote their own website(s). That's fine. As always, you can link to your website in your Profile page, which users can easily reach from any of your posts by clicking on your username.

Furthermore, you can build up your reputation through good posts, and then mention your related websites in your posts.

To those who don't advertise a website here: thank you! I really appreciate your participation and look forward to making GC a more valuable Community for you.

I hope this encourages everyone to maintain their great posting quality and makes this Community a more vibrant and welcoming place for all.

(Paid subscribers-- those with Silver Membership-- are not affected.)

Changed Postbit Format

I've moved the user information to the left side of the post, instead of the top. I'm more comfortable with this way, as it's the way the forum looked when we first started with phpBB over 4 years ago. Also, with the trend towards larger and wider monitors, I think it makes a lot of sense to lay things out vertically, instead of stretched out horizontally. I hope you like it!

Thanks,
Elliot
GC Admin

[veseven]

Bye bye signatures

[Ezhel]

bye bye forum!!!

[x3mario]

I admit I have six(6) signatures on my account. Before I only have three(3) because we can say that it is the allowable number of sigs. But when I found other members that have six sigs in their account, I also used six because I thought that it is legal. No one including admin and mods gives any warning about using more than 3 sigs. If admin and mods are very strict about the number of sigs and length of post required, maybe this would not happen that Intelliot will removed all of our sigs. Well, that's Intelliot's decision, all of us must follow his decision.

Bye bye forum sigs.

[andrew247]

What the hell? No sigs?
Why not just make it like it used to be; limit to two links per sig. If people go above this limit then remove the signature. If they persist, ban them.
Completely removing signatures is going too far. After all, signatures are not soley for people to advertise in, they are used for other purposes.
Now I'm not calling it lazyness, but it's far too extreme a measure for a minor problem that could be solved with some active moderation.
What next? Only people with Silver membership will be allowed to make posts?

EDIT:
Oh yeh, and this will just cause people to add in-post signatures, which apart from being harder to moderate will make reading posts more inconvenient.

[jabo]

why do you have to punish everyone... punish the spammers... not all... bye bye sigs and forum

[andrew247]

Originally Posted by jabo

why do you have to punish everyone... punish the spammers... not all... bye bye sigs and forum

Exactly, it isn't necessary either.

P.S. Sorry for disagreeing.

[jabo]

Well, apparently, most of the users have now left the forum... seems like the best thing to do.

[Texture2000]

What happen?
Without the Sign, With out the pre-announcement.

[Zeb]

Maybe a better alternative would be to only allow signature links after a certain number of posts say 50 additionally if short spammy posts were a problem users could have been warned that any post consisting of less than 50 words would a, be deleted or b, have no follow attached.