Posted by Jason on March 15th, 2006 — in Forums
I don’t usually go on these type of rants but I am getting sick of people scraping sites then selling them of for $5. It is one of the biggest issues in Webmaster circles right now and it really grinds me. What is unique about this one is that the perpetrator scraped a site I used to own then tried to sell it to me. That just goes to show that the people doing this don’t have a brain cell between them.
So I received this PM:
article database if you are interesting
I read “http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=28823&page=2″ that and ,
if you want I have all articles from articledepot which is (last updated yesterday over 50,000 ) in mysql db .
if you are interested I can sell.
100$
to talk details my msn: ali_ozturk@msn.com
bye
Ali Ozturk
Koc University
Mechanical Engineering
I did a bit of digging and got the following details on this guy (He had 0 posts at DP so he obviously signed up just to spam people):
Ali Ozturk
ali_ozturk@msn.com
He owns http://www.koseyazari.net/ (Don’t bother going to it, its re-routed to this site by the spammer but heres what it looks like)
He is sending the actual message from a college computer using their email
aliozturk@ku.edu.tr
IP Address: 193.140.63.219
He uses the user name dewilsdance in forums like
Feel free to email this guy as much as you like. I will soon have his address so you can sign him up for magazine subscriptions and send Chinese food to his apartment. I am sure the college would also be interested as illegal activity would be against their guidelines for sure. You can complain to them at information@ku.edu.tr
Have Fun 
*Added* Its amazing what you can find with just one email. Here is his address and phone number:
Ali Ozturk
Rumeli Fener Yolu
Istanbul, Istanbul 34450
Turkey
905335578513
You can also get more people spamming by Digging This Post
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Posted by Jason on March 2nd, 2006 — in Forums
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote on the Fall of SEOChat and talked about the fact that many hours of the day, there would be no one even online with the exception of a few guests. Then over the last month since I wrote that article it seemed like there were more and more members logging in. It reminded me of a mail that I received shortly after my article on some of the practices within Devshed. I am tempted to reveal the contents of that letter but honestly, unless I can prove something myself, I don’t feel comfortable. Instead I will talk in General terms being sure to specify if something is only rumour.
Everything I say from now on is said more from an advertisers viewpoint as some things don’t matter to the end user. I will use the first tactic that Devshed now employs at SEOChat as an example. Basically it is inflating the actual users that are online at any moment. This is a common tactic with new forums to enable the option in vB where if a user logs out, they still show up for 15 minutes after the fact. Sometimes new forums even specify users who have logged in that day. The issue here though is that SEOChat counts active users for 15 minutes after they leave or log out without revealing this fact. This makes the board look more active then it is in reality to advertisers. That to me is where the issue is as it skews the amount of people on the board (guests and visitors) quite a bit. Now I can already hear the “so whats”.
You have to actually combine this with the fact that they have taken on a more devious deception. It is at this point that I will switch to forums in general rather then specifics as I have no proveable evidence against any forum in particular. Generally, forums have a responsibility to advertisers to hit certain numbers for pageviews, unique visitors, etc. It actually isn’t that difficult to recode certain parts of forums to misrepresent these numbers. Now I am not talking about a 15 minute lag time here but instead an actual doubling (or tripling if necessary) of things like visitors and pageviews. To me this is basically a real scumbag move and I would just say to any forum in general that these kinds of things tend to come back to you.
Basically, there are a lot of successful forums out there that don’t stoop to these levels and they are the ones that continue to grow. You need to be honest with both your membership and your advertisers, otherwise it isn’t long until you find your self with an empty forum and no money.
1 Comment »
Posted by Jason on February 23rd, 2006 — in Forums
I recently received this comment in my reputation box and although it was a bit tongue in cheek, it is actually a comment I have seen quite often, many times 
not kidding. It comes in many varieties from saying I should be spending this time on link requests or to the other extreme of just calling me a loser for posting so much. In honour of the fact that I passed 10,000 posts at DP this week, I thought I would address this and maybe even debunk it a bit. There are two parts to it and hopefully I can successfully make both my points.
The first point is that there is a lot of assumption in that comment. It basically assumes that while posting at a forum, everything else is on hold. I am sure there are some people that log on and just stay on a forum site waiting for replies but I actually have my forums running on a separate monitor. I typically work on projects and at the same time hit the new posts button from time to time. If I see anything that catches my eye, I write a reply then go back to the other monitor. The most time consuming task is catching up with the posts which went up while I wasn’t online. I have a very complicated approach to this. Each morning I simply mark “All posts read” and start from scratch. I believe if there is something important being discussed, someone will reply and I will then see the thread. If it is a thread I haven’t seen before and has a ton of replies, I often judge by the title if its even worth it for me to “catch up”. If its a General Chat thread I almost never go back and read every single post. So, I typically work an 8-10 hour day but my *actual* forum time is probably in the neighborhood of 30 minutes if it was condensed. So there isn’t a whole lot of time I could be doing anything with - Not to mention the breaks from working on sites seems to actually help my productivity.
The second aspect is that in the past, forum posting has actually been quite profitable for me. I will take DP as my example seeing as how I just passed a posting milestone. In the period from January 2005 to January 2006, I brought in approximately $12,000 through both the Buy/Sell/Trade section and through personal relationships formed throughout my posting. Now this is still just a percentage of my income but it certainly is signifigant. This money can break down into the following areas (although I’m not comfortable giving financial specifics) :
Site Sales:
This was probably the largest chunk of my forum income. Normally I wouldn’t be in the site selling business but in that particular time frame, I was building a house so every penny was welcome. Now anyone can take a valuable site, bring it to a forum, make $5,000 and say they made $5,000 by posting there. I wouldn’t count that as income in this situation because you didn’t necessarily profit by posting. For the sites I sold in the last year, many were promoted almost exclusively through the forum over time and gained much of their value through my relationships and posting. A particular example was partnerships which added tremendous value to aspects of my sites (and provided value in other ways to partners). These partnerships wouldn’t have been possible without spending some time on the forum.
Link Sales:
Link sales or advertising can be a very spur of the moment thing. By monitoring trends I was able to see when was the best time to make offerings and in what format. This is a tricky one because I have seen fly by nights come into a B/S/T section not understanding their target audience and get pennies on the dollar. Personally, I find link selling to be a bit of a roller coaster and it wouldn’t be a preferred source of income.
Revenue Share:
Many forums offer revenue sharing these days although this is in no way time efficient. In the last year at DP for instance my AdSense account probably saw around $300. The first 6 months saw the majority of that and after the NY Times article, it dwindled quite a bit. I can only attribute that to the sheer volume of threads created by a few users which seem to have thinned things out for those like myself who start fewer threads. Anything I have gained from revenue share has gone to another members Homeless Charity. I did that not only to help but I like the fact that every thread I do start is out of interest not gain.
There are many other sources including services and investment partnerships which have been direct results of my forum involvement but I hold those a little close to the chest for obvious reasons. I also chose January for the time frame as since then I have not had the time due to a hectic personal life which has only allowed me to support my primary income sources.
Regardless, although many people may be losers for how much time they spend on forums, I can tell you not only from my examples given above regarding DP, but over many forums which I am involved with, there are a lot of very successful entrepreneurs that seem to spend signifigant time while still being very efficient and profitable.
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