The business issues are:
1) paid or unpaid crappers whose goal is to grafitti your house;
2) need for some management tool(s) to control crappers for the beneefit of all;
3) keeping all the IH boards valuable for the vast majority of users i.e. lurkers, new investors, etc.
4) if there is not an inherent tool to manage crappers, either eviction, filtering, or some other tool, then the investment made by all the suscribers will be greatly impaired as the quality of information goes down.
5) If all you want is a private (i.e. not valuable for the public) board, then other forums provide that for free e.g. Raging Bull.
6) Subscribers get many very valuable benefits that have to do with frequency and productivity. The issue is making a critical management tool that everyone needs a subscriber only tool, then the quality of the board is ruined for the vast majority of users;
7) If you want a valluable public board, what tools are available to the public if there is no eviction and no filtering?
8) I for one, was not aware that filtering was a "temporary" free feature. This seems like a chage of policy. Unfortunately, perhaps to the ruin of your entire house, unless some other tool appears to ensure or at least promote higher quality information.
9) Disk space must be a cost and concern for you, so if crappers are allowed to run rampant, then that will cost you in storage space, won't it?
10) I could go on and on as to why this policy change can ruin your business, IMO.
Posted by: Corp_Buyer
In reply to: Desert dweller who wrote msg# 17802 Date:4/4/2003 1:10:57 PM
Post #of 17819
OT: DD- you make a good sales pitch, but as a matter of principle there has to be a means available to manage (reduce or eliminate) non-productive crappers not just on the IDCC board but on all IH boards. The solution can't be for everyone to be a subscriber, since the vast majority of users are lurkers or occasional posters or new investors looking for initial information. This site does derive revenues from non-subscribers e.g. ad revenues and the subscribers do have many other great features for their fee e.g. multiple-reads, PM, spell checking, etc.. But, there MUST be an INHERENT tool available to eliminate crappers and folks who post non-sense, all rhetorical questions, excessive posts (about 10% of the posts recently were from one such subscriber poster), and other board abuses whatever their motivations may be. Raging Bull provided board managers and users with BOTH filtering and eviction tools to deal with crappers. The fact is there are some folks for that whatever reason, WANT (or maybe they are paid) to paint the beautiful house with graffiti and to TP the lawn (to use Matt and Bob's house analogy). So, there must be some means to manage such abusers INHERENT in the service for all i.e. subscribers, non-subscribers, lurkers, new investors seeking to read information, etc.. When we first came over here, Bob and Matt CHOSE to not have eviction as a tool, so they implemented free (i.e. available to all) filtering as the one and only ALTERNATE management tool. Now, with free filtering gone, we as a board are missing an essential management TOOL, to help the vast majority of users. The IDCC board and all IH boards are fatally flawed, IMO, without some management tool, as a matter of principle, thinking about all the lurkers, new investors, and occasional users. To have a viable public investor board, there needs to be a management tool to handle crappers. If all you want is a member only private board, then as a competitive matter RB provides that for free, don’t they? Coming to IH was a big improvement in many ways including the great features available to subscribers, but the best advantage I noticed was that posting was opened up to lurkers and new investors, but we do need a tool to manage the riff raff if not by eviction. So, I am disappointed by the recent policy to make filtering a subscriber tool and frankly, unless some other tool appears, the new policy will ruin all the boards at IH and the investment of all IH subscribers (not just IDCC subscribers) will be impaired.
Regards,
Corp_Buyer
