don't know the boundaries or don't follow the rules. Give them an inch, they take 3. It's like giving graffiti artists (nothing against graffiti artists) a sanctioned area for them to legally put up their murals. While some artists do respect the rules and stay within the permitted areas to paint, there are others who go off limits putting murals and tags up outside of those sanctioned areas --eventually ruining it all with the sanctioned area becomes off limits too.
The reason why these forum have remained as constructive and productive as they are today, is because our incredible volunteer mods--who continue to proactively monitor the forums for spam and ads and remove them immediately, without them this these forums would easily turn into spammers' stomping ground.
I've seen entire forums get over taken by spammers within a few weeks and if nothing is done about them, it eventually they go down the tubes.
funkid7, I don't know if you knew this, but did you know that the music.download.com had a forum for artists a couple years back? It was a forum created for music artist for them to talk shop. Well, eventually it was completely overtaken by spammers because artists would link to their music sites and what not, and eventually spammers started to do the same. Next thing you know, you couldn't tell an advertiser from an artist and eventually the forums were trashed and had to be shut down because nobody would visit it anymore except spammers.
While I can see some benefits of this type of forum you mention, it requires constant monitoring as it can easily get abused and get out of hand. And the negative side of it out weighs the benefits as the reason I stated above. I would like to keep these forums focused on the tech side of things and keeping our members in the mind frame of helping one another out without having to wade through ads and other off-topic posts. There are plenty of sites for ads and classfieds etc... out there and I will leave it up to those sites to host them. I do appreciate your suggestion, but for now I will pass on the idea.
Respectfully,
-Lee
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